The starting point for this master thesis was the product of the company "Humlegården", which allows its tenants in office buildings to follow their electricity consumption in real time, through their Smartphone's. The idea that resulted from that application is to investigate if it is possible to direct the tenants in office buildings to reduce their energy consumptions, but also to be satisfied with the indoor environment. This work addresses the factors which are the main energy consumers in office buildings. It addresses legal requirements and standards which are important to follow in order to achieve good thermal comfort in buildings. Some of them are physical climate factors like thermal environment, air quality and lightning.

To establish good horse welfare there are several factors that need to be considered. One important factor is the environment in which the horses are kept. In Sweden horses are stabled during long periods of time in the cold season and consequently the stable environment is even more important. The most essential environmental factors in a horse stable are ambient temperature, relative humidity (RH) and concentrations of contaminants in the stable air. The air in a horse stable contains dust, noxious gases, moulds and microorganisms which all can contribute to developing respiratory diseases in horses.

ICA is the largest general dealer in the Swedish market as well as the largest supplier to the independent ICA-dealers. The principal and one of the biggest stakeholders of this thesis is the department Supply Chain Development who is responsible for the development of ICA?s Supply Chain.The purpose of this study is to examine how ICA?s sales are affected by weather and to make recommendations on how ICA should proceed with its work regarding this issue. By leveraging their forecasts by including weather, ICA hopes that their logistical metrics amount of spoilage, service levels and number of inventory days will improve. This thesis describes how ICA is working with weather currently, and furthermore it discusses the existing literature within this area.

By using steady-state measurements for predicting emissions under a dynamic drive cycle wouldsave a lot of time and money for the exhaust aftertreatment specialists at Volvo cars. The idea forthis thesis has been to investigate if statistical regression models can be used with good accuracy.Questions included are for example if common operating variables such as engine speed, air-fuelratio etc. is sufficient to predict engine-out emissions over the engine operating range with goodaccuracy. Focus was set on the modelling of warm engine, but also the more complex engineheat-up phase was investigated since it is a great contributor to total emissions. While NOxcouldnot be measured because of malfunctioning measurement equipment, only HC, CO andtemperature at inlet of first catalytic converter has been modelled.

The decision of the European Commission to block the merger between Volvo and Scania in the late 90?s became the starting point to the debate of the possible discriminating effects of the European merger regulation. Especially since the Commission a few years earlier had approved of the merger between Mercedes-Benz and Kässbohrer on the German bus market, where the conditions for competition had been similar to those at hand in the Swedish case. The issue that was and still is in focus is whether the European merger regulation is more difficult to pass for large companies situated on a smaller domestic market than is the case for their competitors of corresponding size but situated on a larger domestic market.This thesis aims at examining what the judgement of the geographical relevant market means for the application of the Merger act. This is being done from two perspectives.

More often consumers demand instant dry soup that can be prepared with a water temperature below 100o C, which is currently not possible, because the dry soup becomes too thin when using water with a lower temperature. In this study, various kinds of starch studies were made to optimize the starch used in the existing product to make it more viscous at both high and low temperatures. The result was that one of the two starches present in the existing product was retained by change in quantity as it contributed to important flavor parameters. The second was removed and replaced with a starch that made the product more viscous at lower temperatures. To find out if the new product differed from the existing product a viscosity measurement and a sensory paired preference test were made.

The following project has been made in collaboration with, Denator AB, a biotechnology enterprise. One-dimensional electrophoreses have been used to analyze protein contents of tissue samples. Tissue samples have been either treated according to the company´s newly developed tissue treatment technique or not treated at all and comparisons between these samples have been made. In order to see differences in protein patterns between samples more clearly, a conversion method has been developed where electrophoresis gel visual patterns are used to produce curves, similar to densitometer curves.Denator AB would like to know if the proteins in their treated samples will change visibly over 48 h when incubated at room temperature. This has been investigated using the above mentioned method.

As break downs of production transformers are costly and often result in long outages it is essential for reliability of operation that the transformers are manufactured to be robust. The aim of this M.Sc. thesis is to investigate if deviations should be made from the standard IEC 60076 ? Power Transformers in order to describe a robust large power transformer for procurement.The investigation has been conducted in three stages. In the first stage a definition of the term robust was developed in consultation with the client Vattenfall Vattenkraft.

Due to increasing regulations regarding new diesel vehicles particulate matteremissions the new Scania truck, Scania Euro 6, has been equipped with a particulatefilter. This component effectively stores the particles in the exhaust gas but must becleaned in order to prevent itself from clogging. The filter is cleaned through aprocess named regeneration which is a thermodynamic process in which thetemperature of the filter is raised through fuel supplied to the exhaust gas.The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the development of improved controlstrategies of the temperature during the regeneration process through thedevelopment of model-based controllers. These controllers are designed in order tohave good performance in stationary as well as automatic regeneration.In order to develop these model-based controllers a model of the system isconstructed. The model is described as a linear thermodynamic grey-box model withflow varying parameters, showing good results in validation.The model provides a simulation environment during the controller design, which isfocused around the development of linear regulators with the exhaust gas mass flowas a scheduling variable whose size determines controllers? mode of operation.

We have the tradition in Sweden to build villas and houses with a wooden framework. It has become natural for us because we have so much forest in our country. Building with wood has advantages, it is easy to process, but also disadvantages, as it is sensitive to moisture.Finland has long made use of the thermal blocks to build villas. It is a type of bricks that are a bit like a sandwich element, with a core of EPS and concrete on both sides of the core material. The concrete is hollow, so that after the walls has been bricked up you pour concrete into the hollow bricks.The issue of this report is to find out if concrete can be an alternative to wood as framework material in villas.

Master Thesis in Business Administration, School of Business Administration, Linaeus University, Finance 4FE03E, Spring 2011Authors: Benni Hansson, Axel SandquistTutor: Christopher von KochExaminer: Sven-Olof CollinTitle: Compensation as a means of monitoring or recruiting ? a study on ownership structure in Swedish listed companies.Keywords: CEO compensation, compensation structure, ownership structure, ownership types, ownership concentration, agency theory, resource dependence theory, managerial theoryBackground: There has been extensive research on CEO compensation, however not a lot on Swedish listed firms. Many studies have an agency theoretical perception on CEO compensation. In accordance with this, compensation is used as a means to solve monitoring and incentives problems.Purpose: The aim of this study is to examine the role of CEO compensation, by studying ownership structure.Method: To examine the role of CEO compensation we use a multi-theory approach, based on agency theory, resource dependence theory and managerial theory. The companies examined are Swedish listed firms the in years 2005 to 2009.

Uvån Hagfors Teknologi AB (UHT) has developed a process ? GRANSHOT® ? for quicksolidification of metals in water baths. In the process liquid metal is splintered ? granulated ?into small drops. The drops are rapidly cooled in a water bath where all the heat energy from theliquid metal is transferred into the water.

The purpose of this work was to provide a better understanding of urea?s decomposition and byproduct formation in an SCR system on heavy trucks. In my experimental setup with TGA-DSC-FTIR (a combination of two thermal analysis methods and a method for gas phase detection), an FTIR method for urea in the gas phase was developed for the qualitative and quantitative determination of urea and its decomposition products. Chemicals such as urea, biuret, cyanuric acid and melamine of p.a. quality were used in this method development. Beforehand, there was no FTIR method available to detect these substances; hence, the aim of this work was to develop an FTIR method to understand the degradation chain of urea. The combination of TGA and DSC was used for analysis of different samples, where urea, biuret, cyanuric acid and melamine in varying amounts have been weighted in for various experiments in order to study the temperature at which a phase transition or reaction occurs, i.e.

We have the tradition in Sweden to build villas and houses with a wooden framework. It has become natural for us because we have so much forest in our country. Building with wood has advantages, it is easy to process, but also disadvantages, as it is sensitive to moisture.Finland has long made use of the thermal blocks to build villas. It is a type of bricks that are a bit like a sandwich element, with a core of EPS and concrete on both sides of the core material. The concrete is hollow, so that after the walls has been bricked up you pour concrete into the hollow bricks.The issue of this report is to find out if concrete can be an alternative to wood as framework material in villas.

The objective of this M. Eng. Diploma work was to validate the new version, CASMO-5M, and compare the results with CASMO-4E, by using the same input in both programs. The tasks that were included in this work was to compare TIP-measures, k-effective curves (warm), k-effective curves (cold), the effect of void on k-effective, the isothermal temperature coefficient (ITC), the moderator temperature coefficient (MTC), damping ratio calculations, internal effect in a fuel bundle of a BA-rod, the speed of BA-out burn, impact of xenon, falling control rod, margins and isotopes.The TIP-measures showed that the differences were small for all reactors, at most, 6% nodal improvement by C5M (Casmo-5M) for Oskarshamn 3. The warm measurements of k-effective showed that C5M had a higher value for all cycles of Oskarshamn 1, 2 and 3 in comparison to C4E (Casmo-4E).