Abstract

Abstract
The Paul Wurth Bell-Less Top® (BLT) is the industrial standard for iron blast furnace charging systems. Since Paul Wurth's invention of the BLT in the early 1970s the system has evolved with the changes in iron-making technologies and market conditions. With the latest demands for high charging equipment availability and maintainability - new developments have been recently implemented. The paper will cover the evolution of the Bell-Less Top®, the latest operational requirements and the latest new developments and solutions.

Abstract
In this work the objective was to develop a bioclimatic model to forecast olive yield based on airborne pollen, soil water content, and favourable conditions for phytopathological attacks. Olive airborne pollen was sampled from 1998 to 2006 using Cour traps installed in the Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro region, in the provinces of Valenca do Douro and Vila Nova de Foz-Coa. Meteorological data from a meteorological station located in Pinhao, near the pollen samplers, was used to calculate other independent variables. According to the bioclimatic model, at the flowering stage 63% of regional olive production can be predicted from the regional pollen index, with an average deviation between observed and predicted production of 10%. The variable soil water content enabled an increase in forecasting accuracy of about 30%, and a reduction in the average deviation between observed and predicted production of 6%. The final regression with all three variables tested showed that the bioclimatic model was able to predict the annual variability of regional olive fruit production with an accuracy of 97%, the average deviation between observed and predicted production being 3% for internal validation and 6% for external validation.

Abstract
The impact of climatic changes can be evaluated by analysing the long-trends of plant phenological events. The airborne pollen sampling and the study of Apis mellifera L. (honeybee) collected pollen are two methodologies that can be used to survey the date of occurrence of the flowering phase. The aim of the present work was to compare the anemophilous and entomophilous pollen flows of Castanea sativa (chestnut tree) in two regions of the north-west of Portugal. The synchronism between the airborne samples and the honeybee samples was confirmed by the significant positive correlation between them. The inter-annual variations in the beginning and peak dates of pollen flows were very similar although an anticipation was observed in the honeybees.

Abstract
Plantain (Plantago spp.) is generally considered to be an anemophilous plant that produces pollen of low nutritional value to bees. Between April and September during 2002 and 2003, in two regions in northwestern Portugal, we studied both the pollen collected by honey bee colonies and airborne pollen. Plantain pollen collection by honey bees was observed only in three different periods, despite its continuous presence in the air. This behaviour was related to the beginning and ending of flowering of the honey bee's main nutritional pollen sources, with no other factor seemingly influencing the temporal collecting patterns. The collection of Plantago spp. pollen was observed in the gaps between the flowering of Eucalyptus spp., chestnut (Castanea sativa), wild blackberry (Rubus spp.) and heaths (Ericaceae family). The results suggest that pollen of Plantago species seems to be used by honey bees as a substitute for other more nutritious pollen types and is collected only as a supplementary source. The temporal patterns of Plantago pollen collection by honey bees could therefore be used as a valuable ecological indicator of periods with low availability of highly nutritious pollen sources.

Abstract
A fully automatic methodology based on image processing is proposed to evaluate the quality of spray application sampled by water-sensitive papers (WSP). The methods proposed permit a computation of the fraction of spray coverage, an evaluation of the homogeneity of the spray spatial spread at various scales and directions, and extraction of stain and droplet size range and distribution. This allows the number of droplets per unit area and the standard droplet size spectra factors to be computed. The methods were tested with a number of test samples scanned at different resolutions, proving to be effective in situations where there is high spray coverage in the WSP, thus with considerable overlap between stains. The most suitable scanning resolution was found to be 600 dpi. The results obtained by the image processing methods were successfully compared with a manual (visual) counting of stains in a test sample.