CO2 capture from gaseous effluents is one of the great challenges faced by chemical and environmental engineers, as the increase in CO2 levels in the Earth atmosphere might be responsible for dramatic climate changes. From the existing capture technologies, the only proven and mature technology is chemical absorption using aqueous amine solutions. However, bearing in mind that this process is somewhat expensive, it is important to choose the most efficient and, at the same time, the least expensive solvents. For this purpose, a pilot test facility was assembled and includes an absorption column, as well as a stripping column, a heat exchanger between the two columns, a reboiler for the stripping column, pumping systems, surge tanks and all necessary instrumentation and control systems. Some different aquous amine solutions were tested on this facility and it was found that, from a set of six tested amines, diethanol amine is the one that turned out to be the most economical choice, as it showed a higher CO2 loading capacity (0.982 mol of CO2 per mol of amine) and the lowest price per litre (25.70 €/L), even when compared with monoethanolamine, the benchmark solvent, exhibiting a price per litre of 30.50 €/L.

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The ARINC 653 specification defines the functionality that an Operating System (OS) must guarantee to enforce robust spatial and temporal partitioning as well as an avionics application programming interface for the system.The standard application interface -the ARINC 653 Application Executive (APEX) -is defined as a set of software services a compliant OS must provide to avionics application developers. The ARINC 653 specification defines the interfaces and the behavior of the APEX but leaves implementation details to OS vendors. This paper describes an OS independent design approach of a Portable APEX interface. POSIX, as a programming interface available on a wide range of modern OS, will be used to implement the APEX layer. This way the standardization of the APEX is taken a step further: not only the definition of services is standardized but also its interface to the underlying OS. Therefore, the APEX operation does not depend on a particular OS but relies on a well defined set of standardized components. Inter-partition communication Interfaces:This module implements the communication means between processes in different partitions. All inter-partition communication is conducted via messages. When sent by user applications, messages are copied into local buffers. The underlying PMK is then responsible for actually transferring a given message to the corresponding buffer in the target partition, providing the physical means to activate message exchange between the source process and the outer destination.

The ARINC 653 standard has taken a leading role within the aeronautical industry in the development of safety-critical systems based on the Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) concept. One of the main promises of IMA is cost saving in reduced development, integration and verification and validation effort. To exploit the full potential of cost savings, it is necessary to establish an effective way to prototype, develop, test and analyse on-board applications without having access to the final IMA target platform for all engineers.Target platforms are usually extremely expensive considering hardware and software prices as well as training costs. This paper describes the architecture of the Integrated Modular Avionics Development Environment (IMADE) that is based on Linux and the ARINC 653 simulator Simulated IMA (SIMA) that was developed by Skysoft