The need of raw material does of course fluctuate but the long term view is an increasing demand due to the growing consumption of sawn timber products, pulp, paper and lately also biomass. This has led to a keener competition for wood. At the same time there is an ongoing structural change of a significant part in the Swedish wood supply market, the private forest owners. In 1992, 22 % of Sweden´s 335 000 private forest owner lived apart from their forest. In 2007 this figure had risen to 36 %.

It is important to construct or recreate different types of wetlands and study their retention of nutrients, since knowledge of their effectiveness in this matter is poor. In 2003 a wetland was constructed on an old meadow on the western shore of Lake Bornsjön in central Sweden. The main purpose of the wetland was to reduce the amount of phosphorus entering the lake, which is the back-up water supply for Stockholm when the city cannot obtain water from Lake Mälaren. Large areas around Lake Bornsjön consist of agricultural land and the nutrient concentrations in the inflows to the lake are usually relatively high (approx. 1 mg/l total nitrogen and 0.05-0.1 mg/l total phosphorus).

The popularity of vegetated, or green roofs, has grown over the past years due to their potential function of maintaining urban environment quality. The aim of this study was to investigate if substrates with different organic material, peat and charcoal, with two contents (3 or 6 weight%) influenced the growth of the cuttings during the first critical period of the establishment. Biochar is used as amendment to agricultural soils and has, theoretically, many of the properties suitable as organic content in green roof-substrates. Peat is one of the materials that is commercially used in green roof industry. The substrate has been treated with different amounts of water.

This paper is to identify and analyze a new trend which we believehas taken off, based on qualitative interviews and analysis of three productions which we have been involved in during a practiceperiod of two months with a production company in Stockholm. This essay intends to define this trend as an organic formation of digital material and to identify the key characteristics which form the basis of how to create a production of this nature..

This essay is a study of the various attitudes and behavioral habits for music consumption and discovery of new music amongst young people in Sweden from a receivers perspective. The aim of the study is to review and map out the current trends, habits and cultural views on music consumption. An online survey was posted and spread on Facebook with 195 respondents as a result. The analyzed result and conclusions of the survey was then to be of use for understanding how to market and spread new music more efficiently. The study showed that there are three dominating sources of music for youth in Sweden.

Svensk Växtkraft is the owner of the biogas plant in Västerås. The company is planning to increase their treatment capacity at their biogas plant. In connection to this work it is also possible to make some energy saving changes to the biogas plant. The objective of this study was therefore to make an electricity and heat survey of the biogas plant, a detailed study of the heat consumption in the sanitation step and also a comparison of energy consumption with the present sanitation method and an alternative strategy where the waste is treated in 55 °C during 10 hours (the current method is heating to 70 °C during 1 hour). The energy survey was conducted in close collaboration with staff at the biogas plant. The current during normal operation was measured, power was calculated and multiplied by the time of usage to obtain the energy consumed.

A future expansion of wind power in the Nordic power system makes the balancing for the transmission system operator Svenska Kraftnät (SvK) more complicated. Up to the hour of delivery the balance responsible parties? (BRP) makes prognoses and plans, for consumption and production, to help maintain the balance in the electrical grid. How well this is accomplished is affected by the setup of the market design. Therefore SvK has proposed the following possible changes in market design: Increase the imbalance costsIntensify the regulation of imbalancesIncrease the temporal resolution on the different marketsPresent the prices for balancing power in real-timeModify the balancing market to simplify auction of consumption bidsA mapping over the BRPs? processes within planning and trading on the day-ahead, intra-day, and the balancing market has been performed in this thesis.

SammanfattningKonsumtion och ekonomi är områden som på olika sätt påverkar människors liv. Forskning visar att värderingar, identiteter och idéer grundas på konsumtion. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka elevernas attityder, kunskaper och beteenden inom konsumtion och ekonomi som är ett kunskapsområde inom ämnet hem- och konsumentkunskap. Författaren var även intresserad av att undersöka om det fanns skillnader mellan två skolor bland elever i årskurs nio som skiljer sig åt vad gäller upptagningsområde och skolans geografiska läge. 153 enkäter delades ut och resultatet analyserades med dataprogrammet IBM Statistics Version 20 (SPSS 2010).

Energy efficiency has become a very topical issue that has been discussed throughout the European Union for preventing negative environmental impacts that have been associated with the consumption of energy. In the residential sector have mainly municipalities set strict requirements for the reduction of energy consumption while the renewable energy has been asked. Different concepts of low-energy buildings have been developed to reduce the cost of operation and maintenance in existing buildings such as in new ones.This thesis has aimed to minimize the energy cost of a large building which has had low energy consumption features originally. Energy reviews has been initiated in order to be able for showing how the house electricity could be carried out even more efficiently.The work was initiated through a literature study to clearly increase the reliability on the energy subject. Different concepts of low-energy buildings have been treated in connection with its specifications, afterward those have been compared with the obtained results.

The Arctic region appears as a pristine remote environment, yet there is increasing evidence that it is greatly impacted by pollution such as lead (Pb) and mercury (Hg). In this environment deposition of Hg has increased threefold since the last industrial revolution. In this study five cryosolic soil profiles within non-sorted circles (NSC) in the Abisko region, northwest of Sweden, has been analyzed to improve our understanding regarding how pollutants are distributed within such type of soil. The soil samples have been analyzed with the use of X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF), for the measurements of the total concentrations of e.g. lead (Pb) and zirconium (Zr).

Simulations of simulink models using Kalman filters are often very time-consuming. This problem depends mainly on the fact that the Kalman correction has to be performed at each sample instance through the whole simulation. The goal for this thesis work is to reduce that time-consumption for the filtering part (the integration partis treated in a complementary report) of a simulation. Furthermore a Matlab routine to perform parameter tuning and finally a graphical user interface is developed.The filtering part of the simulation in this thesis is based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The time optimization of this filter considers searching for the possibility to replace the today?s existing Matlab functions that is used to perform the filtering calculations.

In this essay, we have compared a conventional house to a passive house. The housesshared the same local conditions; they have the same living area and the same layout. Thedifferences between the houses were the different construction solutions for the roof, theouter walls, the floor and the heating system. Both the houses qualify the standards fromBBR and the passive house also lives up to FEBY?s special conditions.The purpose with the essay was to examine if it really is profitable to build small hoses aspassive houses.

One of the most important components of a harvester is the crane. Most harvester cranes are only possible to pivot (or horizontally rotate) at the crane pillar. Cranab in Vindeln, Sweden, has developed a new type of harvester crane which has an extra pivot point on the outer boom. This makes it possible to reach around residual trees, easing thinning work in dense stands. The aim of the study was to analyze if the use of a pivoting outer boom (POB) crane gave an increase in thinning production and if there were any differences in time consumption between the work elements for the POB crane and a conventional crane. A Valmet 911.3 equipped with a POB crane was used in the study.

The demand for district heating is expected to decrease in the future, due to competition from heat pumps and energy efficiency measures in buildings. Development of existing district heating systems is therefore necessary for district heating companies to maintain market shares. This Master?s thesis describes and investigates the heat and electricity production and profitability of a combined Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) and heat pump that is integrated with an existing district heating system. The studied district heating system is utilizing heat from waste incineration. In Sweden waste constitute 20 % of the fuel mix used in district heating systems, and this share is expected to increase in the future.

Every year, pesticides are found in surface and ground waters in Sweden. Fungicides are in common usage and applied in high amounts against potato late blight. The present thesis examined the possible removal of four fungicides (metalaxyl, cyprodinil, propamocarb and mandipropamid) from water using the microalgae Chlorella vulgaris. Microorganisms are capable of decomposing a range of organic pollutants and the main focus in previously published studies has been on bacteria and fungi. Microalgae are mostly studied due to their high capacity in biosorbing heavy metals.