Can you ensure that your smoke detector will sense fire and sound the alarm in the middle of the night?In 80 percent of the cases where emergency pulls out, smoke detectors are missing where the fire occurred. In the year of 2009, 118 people in Sweden died in fires ? most of them would have survived if there had been a functioning smoke detector.Earlier development of smoke detectors has mainly been focusing on components that sense smoke and alert in case of fire. But in most cases the problem has not been whether the smoke detector was working or not as fully assembled, but rather that it was missing.

In the year 1800, about 5 % of the world population lived in cities (World Wide Fund for Nature, 2012, 3). Today that number is about 70 % in Europe and North America, and in 2050 it is expected to be 86 % in the developed world and 67 % in the developing world (www, UN, 2009). In addition, the global population is expected to increase with 2.2 billion people until 2050. As a result of the population increase more food has to be produced which requires more transport from the countryside to the cities. However, this flow of resources faces some difficulties.

This is a study of a group of Swedish travellers, and of the traveller community, a marginalized group named 'tattare', skojare, tavring, knävling, dinglare, resande (Gypsies, pikeys, tinkers, travellers), whose origins and history are unknown to most people.The purpose of the study is to find out what it is like to be a traveller and look at the culture of travellers, in older times and today. I have focused particularly on the women's situation within the culture, in the past and present.The study is based on interviews with 4 persons, from the traveller community, one man and three women. During the interviews other travellers joined and participated in the discussions and the reasoning.My conclusion is that the traveller community is a group, which has been subjected to severe abuse by authorities, but still managed to preserve their culture. The interviewed travelers share a culture, in which women play a prominent role as breadwinners, for the family cohesion and in raising the children. Functions that gives women the role of culture bearers, meaning that it?s through women the culture is carried onwards..

In this thesis a concept for floor hatches for foam pits has been developed. Since there is an existing solution that is powered by hydraulics and is expensive, the goal was to develop a cheaper solution, as simple as possible.A number of different concepts were developed and evaluated. A concept with five sections that are pulled to the side and stacked on each other was chosen as it was thought to have the lowest risk of crush injuries and to be easiest to manage and control. In the opening behind the foam mattress a lifting table is placed to regulate the height of the stacked sections.To be allowed to be installed in the floor of sports halls the sections must be dimensioned according to the construction standards for these types of buildings. Different dimensions of beams in steel and wood materials were evaluated and of those, who lived up to the requirements of the standard, a concept was chosen.

In this project a simulator has been developed (in C++) with the purpose of illustrating how changes in environmental regulations, tax levels and other policy measures affect the composition of an energy system. The aim of the project was to investigate how energy companies? investment strategies are affected when changes in economic and environmental conditions occur. A standard scenario has been created based on current Swedish conditions, but the user can create new scenarios and set parameters freely. The user is tasked with building power plants to supply the city/region with district heating and electricity during a pre-set number of years. When the simulation is finished the result is graded in the following categories: economy, environment and quality. To evaluate the simulator three scenarios were created (?early 20th century?, ?reduced environmental control? and ?future?) in addition to the standard scenario and these were compared with each other by examining how a select group of power plants perform under the given conditions.

Construction of an autonomous wind station was a project with the goal of creating a product that could collect wind data from a sensor and then transfer this data to a server wirelessly over the GSM network. The device would be powered by batteries and solar cells and function fully without requiring external power supply. This required that a small computer was constructed and programmed to store and send data at predetermined cycle times and programming of a server that received the sent data. The project also required optimization of power consumption and dimensioning of solar cells and batteries based on this. The construction of this station demanded research both for the selection of hardware and programming software. The computer was based on a microcontroller and a GSM module that sent the data over the 2G network.

The purpose of this study has been to make an inventory of combustible waste in the region around Norrköping and to investigate the composition of domestic waste, industrial waste and two different types of sludge. The work was performed at the request of Norrköping Miljö & Energi, due to the planning of an incineration plant. The inventory of the waste was performed through inspection of environmental impact reports, from waste disposal plants in a number of local government areas in the region. The quantities were also compared to another inventory, carried out in a different way. The characterisation of the wastes was compared to the fuel specification determined by Norrköping Miljö & Energi.

This report will examine various solar energy technologies in order to decide if they could be applied in the Royal Seaport. The Royal Seaport is a Swedish urban district under development in Stockholm, with the goal of becoming a sustainable district. Two main techniques, solar collectors and solar cells, including sub-categories, are addressed in this report. Another sub-category, a hybrid system, will also be mentioned. The main difference between solar collectors and solar cells is the type of energy produced by the system.

The global climate-change means increasing mean-temperature and higher precipitation in Sweden, which leads to shorter periods of frozen ground in the forest. At the same time the harvesting machines are getting bigger and more powerful. The forest industry aim at an even wood flow, and the ground damage has to be as low as possible. The two biggest causes for ground-damage is the bearing capacity of the forest ground and the ground-pressure of the harvesting machines. The aim of this study was to find out some rules for the machine choice considering ground pressure, when harvesting on ground with low bearing capacity.A field study, using a Valmet 890.3 forwarder, was carried out where different ground pressures and their effect on the ground were tested on two different types of ground.Additionally, an inventory of damaged harvesting grounds was made.

AbstractA general store is a grocery store that is located in the countryside. In today's modern society, it is difficult for general stores to compete with the supermarkets and discounters in terms of price and supply. The purpose of this thesis is to create an understanding of both the rural merchants and its customers? perspective on a well-­?functioning general store. We have conducted a case study of three general stores where we interviewed the merchants about how they do to please their customers? needs and identify key elements of a well-­?functioning general store.

A change towards using more biofuels than fossil fuels is taking place in Sweden, and in many other parts of the world. This makes the use of fuel pellets increasingly popular, causing a greater demand for sawmill sawdust products. There is a trend towards the use of multiple types of shredders, instead of a single type in each sawmill. The purpose of the study was to characterize the different flows of saw particles that can be found at Sävar såg when cutting thick or thin wood with different cutting techniques. The saw particles size, shape, moisture content and heat value were analysed by the cutting stations: first cutting fast and slow, second cutting fast and slow, grading fast and slow and planning.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) är en teknik som enligt många utsetts till framtidens teknologi inom Supply Chain Management. Detta då RFID, utan involvering av människan och utan behov av fri sikt, på distans kan utföra effektiva identifieringar av objekt. Det har emellertid, genom forskning, uppmärksammats problem med RFID och dess i vissa fall bristfälliga ändamålsenlighet inom logistiska sammanhang. Utifrån de möjligheter och hot som RFID innebär, har detta examensarbete kritiskt undersökt hypotesen: "Logistiska RFID-implementeringar är lönsamma och tillförlitliga". Analysen grundar sig på ett arbete genomfört vid Volvo Car Corporation (Volvo) i Göteborg och Olofström, där ett pilotförsök med RFID- utrustning för lång avläsningsdistans installerats och processeffektivitetsstudier fullföljts.

The market for management training programs is growing and the supply of the service is increasing and getting further diversified. A consequence is a market with a wide variety of definitions of the very concept of development, and subsequently a wide variety of practices and methods to achieve development. The individuals that are subject to these programs seldom know what they are purchasing, or what to expect. When assuming a transfer of the developers view on development to the subject, a need for a greater understanding of the concept arises. The purpose of this thesis is to understand what views on development do exist among management trainers and map underlying dimensions of the views to increase the understanding of the concept of development.

The controversial phenomenon of ?seeker-oriented? megachurches are currently transforming the American religious landscape. These churches, some housing up to 30,000 worshippers every week, are targeting religious seekers as their primary objective. Their success in attracting and converting those who usually wouldn?t even think of attending church can in large parts be explained by changes in liturgy, the removal of visible theological discussion and use of shopping mall styled buildings, designed to make the religious seeker feel like home.

ABSTRACTThe privatization of pharmacies in Sweden took place in 2009, in part with higher availability of medicines as justification. For a good adherence, the patients needs a good availability of medicines from pharmacies. The aim of the study was that two years after the pharmacy reform study older people?s opinions on drug supply and pharmacy services, and which pharmacy chains they know about and use. The method used was a quantitative cross-sectional study and was conducted using questionnaires.