Background: On the way to a more sustainable society, transport needs to be urgently optimized regarding energy consumption and pollution control. While in earlier decades, Europe followed automobile technology leaps initiated in the USA, it has decoupled itself for 20 years by focusing research capacity towards the diesel powertrain. The resulting technology shift has led to some 45 million extra diesel cars in Europe. Its outcome in terms of health and environmental effects will be investigated below. Results: Expected greenhouse gas savings initiated by the shift to diesel cars have been overestimated. Only about one tenth of overall energy efficiency improvements of passenger cars can be attributed to it. These minor savings are on the other hand overcompensated by a significant increase of supply chain CO 2 emissions and extensive black carbon emissions of diesel cars without particulate filter. We conclude that the European diesel car boom did not cool down the atmosphere. Moreover, toxic NO x emissions of diesel cars have been underestimated up to 20-fold in officially announced data. The voluntary agreement signed in 1998 between the European Automobile industry and the European Commission envisaging to reduce CO 2 emissions has been identified as elementary for the ensuing European diesel car boom. Four factors have been quantified in order to explain very different dieselization rates across Europe: impact of national car/supplier industry, ecological modernization, fuel tourism and corporatist political governance. By comparing the European diesel strategy to the Japanese petrol-hybrid avenue, it becomes clear that a different road would have both more effectively reduced CO 2 emissions and pollutants.

In spite of abundant literature on the topic, the efficiency of electrocoagulation for a specific effluent cannot be predicted in advance. Prior to designing an industrial wastewater treatment unit, preliminary treatment tests have to be done using different soluble oil wastes with a very high chemical oxygen demand (COD). The influence of various parameters can then be assessed. Coagulant dose, linked to the electrical charge passed and the nature of the waste, seem to be the controlling parameters of process efficiency. The results obtained at the laboratory‐scale have been confirmed in a small pilot cell, and an industrial unit has been designed. A preliminary economic study shows that electrocoagulation may be competitive with current treatment technologies. From knowledge gained at bench‐scale, we concluded that electrocoagulation appears to be a suitable process for treatment of soluble oily wastes with high COD.

Optimization of construction parameters of the crystallizer to reach the optimal dynamic mode.Choice of best apparatus satisfying the requirements from database on crystallizer producers.The system is designed open for further development.We have developed a new concept of Technical Scale Free Flow Zone Electrophoresis (TSFFZE), primarily to separate mixtures of biological substances, as there are proteins or amino acids under the impact of an electrical field. The new device operates with one small chamber dimension (1 mm) to handle negative effects caused by the electrical field. However, in contrast to previous approaches, the smallest dimension is now parallel to the electric field. The mixture to be separated enters the cell as a thin layer, which splits up into different fractions. The required residence time is small, as the distances the molecules have to travel are in the order of a millimetre, only. This, in turn, increases throughput and limits temperature rise to a few degrees, even in adiabatic operation. A straightforward scale up to increase the throughput is not performed in the small but in the two other dimensions.