Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Safety Shoes Toe Caps Manufacturing Processes

Toe caps are fundamental components of safety footwear used to prevent injuries which can be caused by falling objects. They can be realized by exploiting different materials (metal, composites and plastics) and manufacturing processes (stamping, injection molding, compression molding, etc.). However, they have always to fulfill the stringent requirements of safety regulations. In addition, in order to guarantee an ergonomic use, they must be as light as possible. It is estimated that at least 300 million pairs of safety footwear, with 600 million of toe caps, end up in landfill or are incinerated every year. This huge amount of wastes generates a relevant environmental impact, mainly attributable to toe caps manufacturing. In this context, it is important to develop new solutions which minimize the environmental impacts of toe caps manufacturing. Among others, the reuse of carbon fiber prepreg scraps has been recognized as a valid method to produce effective toe caps. In this paper, a detailed analysis of the environmental impacts associated to toe caps realized with reclaimed prepreg scraps has been conducted exploiting the Life Cycle Assessment methodology. The results have been compared to those obtained by analyzing toe caps realized in steel, aluminum, polycarbonate and glass fiber composite. Results demonstrate that the reclaim process for carbon fiber prepreg scraps can be a valid circular economy model to produce more sustainable toe caps for safety footwear.

Frontiers in Oral Mucosal Immunity and the Microbiome

The 2nd International Conference on Oral Mucosal Immunity and the Microbiome (OMIM) took place at the Grecotel Kos Imperial Hotel, Kos, Greece, between 25th and 30th September 2021, under the auspices of the Aegean Conferences. This has only been the second Aegean Conference of this thematic, the first one having taken place in 2018 in Crete, during the same period of the year. Given the hardships in travel and heightened infection transmission risks amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Conference was well attended by 29 international speakers across the world. For many of the participants, this was the first conference travel in the post-pandemic era, and quite significant that it has taken place on the island of Hippocrates. Stringent regional health and safety regulations had to be followed to accomplish for this in-person Conference to take place. Frontiers in Oral Health has hosted papers from presentations of the Conference, whereas the present article serves as the proceedings of the Conference with summaries of the presentations.

Bioproduction of 2-Phenylethanol through Yeast Fermentation on Synthetic Media and on Agro-Industrial Waste and By-Products: A Review

Due to its pleasant rosy scent, the aromatic alcohol 2-phenylethanol (2-PE) has a huge market demand. Since this valuable compound is used in food, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, consumers and safety regulations tend to prefer natural methods for its production rather than the synthetic ones. Natural 2-PE can be either produced through the extraction of essential oils from various flowers, including roses, hyacinths and jasmine, or through biotechnological routes. In fact, the rarity of natural 2-PE in flowers has led to the inability to satisfy the large market demand and to a high selling price. Hence, there is a need to develop a more efficient, economic, and environmentally friendly biotechnological approach as an alternative to the conventional industrial one. The most promising method is through microbial fermentation, particularly using yeasts. Numerous yeasts have the ability to produce 2-PE using l-Phe as precursor. Some agro-industrial waste and by-products have the particularity of a high nutritional value, making them suitable media for microbial growth, including the production of 2-PE through yeast fermentation. This review summarizes the biotechnological production of 2-PE through the fermentation of different yeasts on synthetic media and on various agro-industrial waste and by-products.

Harm and Helmets: How Harmful Social Costs Fail to Justify Paternalistic Health and Safety Regulations

Mill’s harm principle and the financial externalities of risky behavior are routinely invoked to justify health and safety regulation. However, this approach fares poorly when subjected to theoretical scrutiny. First, it is false: individuals engaging in risky behavior do not harm others. Second, even if risky behavior were harmful to others, the argument from harmful externalities does not imply safety-enhancing policy interventions, at least not without additional appeals to paternalism. Third, focusing on the economic impacts of accidents invites perverse victim-blaming attitudes toward accident victims that undermine democratic values and justice. To improve our moral understanding of health and safety regulation, I sketch a theory of public policy justification grounded in the controversies which attract our attention to paternalistic polices in the first place. On this account, justificatory arguments are plausible if they identify goods that individuals genuinely affirm on their own terms, are sensitive to causal responsibility and imbalances between restraint and protection, and comparatively engage with possible policy alternatives. Illustrating the shortcomings of one dominant approach to public policy justification and reorienting us toward the controversies that policy justifications need to confront reflect two ways that political theory can help enhance justice in public policy design and articulation.

Effectiveness of Learning Systems from Common Image File Types to Detect Osteosarcoma Based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) Models

Osteosarcoma is a rare bone cancer which is more common in children than in adults and has a high chance of metastasizing to the patient’s lungs. Due to initiated cases, it is difficult to diagnose and hard to detect the nodule in a lung at the early state. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are effectively applied for early state detection by considering CT-scanned images. Transferring patients from small hospitals to the cancer specialized hospital, Lerdsin Hospital, poses difficulties in information sharing because of the privacy and safety regulations. CD-ROM media was allowed for transferring patients’ data to Lerdsin Hospital. Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) files cannot be stored on a CD-ROM. DICOM must be converted into other common image formats, such as BMP, JPG and PNG formats. Quality of images can affect the accuracy of the CNN models. In this research, the effect of different image formats is studied and experimented. Three popular medical CNN models, VGG-16, ResNet-50 and MobileNet-V2, are considered and used for osteosarcoma detection. The positive and negative class images are corrected from Lerdsin Hospital, and 80% of all images are used as a training dataset, while the rest are used to validate the trained models. Limited training images are simulated by reducing images in the training dataset. Each model is trained and validated by three different image formats, resulting in 54 testing cases. F1-Score and accuracy are calculated and compared for the models’ performance. VGG-16 is the most robust of all the formats. PNG format is the most preferred image format, followed by BMP and JPG formats, respectively.

Implementation of TQM and the Integration of BIM in the Construction Management Sector in Saudi Arabia

Total Quality Management (TQM) is based on the conceptions of managing and enhancing the success of construction projects. When applied, TQM improves execution of time management of project, satisfies clients’ needs, minimizes the expenses and increases the profit of contractor, and fulfils safety regulations on the construction site. This research is aimed at evaluating the impacts of employing the concepts of TQM to the construction projects in Saudi Arabia. The results of the study were obtained through utilization of a descriptive analytical approach, where 300 questionnaires were distributed to engineering firms and companies with a response rate of 200 questionnaires, hence achieving the study sample for this research. The data gathered was analyzed by applying the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) program and calculating the relative importance index (RII) and the mean values. From the research conducted, the outcomes showed that the management’s ability to commit using TQM while applying BIM obtained a relative importance of (0.717), while the relative importance for the management’s ability to commit using TQM without the application of BIM is (0.552). The results showed that construction projects in Saudi Arabia still sustain setbacks from applying TQM concepts and suffer from the lack of administrative, scientific, and technical applications.

The inertial loads of a telescopic boom of a truck crane

Problem. The analysis of existing research and publications in which the main problem is highlighted, namely, that many factors are not taken into account when calculating the inertial loads of the car crane arrows. Accounting for these factors will allow you to more accurately determine the inertial loads of the boom of the car crane, to carry out strength-hunches of the elements of the boom and the selection of components of its drive mechanisms. Goal. The purpose of the work is to determine the inertial navan-loads acting on the load and arrow of the automobile-side crane during the unstable movement of its. Methodology. To calculate the inertial loads, the technique of determining the total inertial loads of the car crane boom during joint operations in accordance with the Safety Regulations has been developed. Total inertial loads were determined for the following cases: joint lifting (lowering) of cargo and arrows; lifting the load and turning the boom; lifting and turning the arrow. Results. The resulting dependencies for determining the inertial loads of the rotary boom of the car crane will allow more accurately taking into account multiple factors to calculate the values of these loads in order to conduct strong calculations of the boom, the selection of its components mechanisms. Originality. When calculating inertial loads, the weight and length of the boom are taken into account; weight and height of lifting of cargo; the radius of the arrow crane; rotation speed of the rotary part of the crane; speed of movement of cargo and arrows; start time and braking of cargo lifting mechanisms, change of departure and turn of the boom. The advantage of this technique is its originality. Practical value. The use of this technique allows more accurately taking into account multiple factors to determine the values of the inertial loads of the automobile crane during the unstable movement of the cargo lifting mechanisms, changes in the discharge of the boom and its rotation in order to conduct strong-standing calculations of the boom elements, the selection of its components.

Liability from the use of medical artificial intelligence: a comparative study of English and Taiwanese tort laws

Background: Modern artificial intelligence applications are appearing in healthcare and medical practices. Artificial intelligence is used both in medical research and on patients via medical devices. The aim of this paper is to examine and compare English and Taiwanese tort laws in relation to medical artificial intelligence. Methods: The methodologies employed are legal doctrinal analysis and comparative law analysis. Results: The investigation finds that English tort law treats wrong diagnostic or wrong advice as negligent misstatement, and mishaps due to devices as a physical tort under the negligence rule. Negligent misstatement may occur in diagnosis or advisory systems, while a negligent act may occur in products used in the treatment of the patient. Product liability under English common law applies the same rule as negligence. In Taiwan, the general principles of tort law in Taiwan’s Civil Code for misstatement and negligent action apply, whereas the Consumer Protection Act provides for additional rules on product liability of traders. Conclusions: Safety regulations may be a suitable alternative to tort liability as a means to ensure the safety of medical artificial intelligence systems.

PROBABILISTIC SAFETY OF ESTUARY VESSELS BASED ON NONLINEAR ROLLING IN WIND AND WAVES

The author was previously involved in the development of the risk-based stability analysis which is now further extended, and used for the safety assessment of estuary container vessels subjected to stochastic action of beam wind and irregular waves. The study was motivated by the new set of safety regulations for estuary vessels issued by Belgian authorities in cooperation with Lloyd’s Register. These regulations introduce very innovative probabilistic ideas to ship stability regulations, and therefore present a significant step forward compared to the classical approach. Still, they do not account properly some important influences, such as wind gusts and motion nonlinearities, so considerably simplify the problem. The present investigation models the vessel motion much more realistically, analyzes the influence of beam wind and beam waves on the probability of a stability failure, and argues whether simplifications proposed by the regulations were justified. It is believed that presented method is not limited to the safety of estuary vessels only, but also gives important guidelines for a more general investigation of ship safety in wind and waves.

PROBABILISTIC SAFETY OF ESTUARY VESSELS BASED ON NONLINEAR ROLLING IN WIND AND WAVES

In the first place the discusser would like to congratulate Dr. Bačkalov with his paper, in which he assesses the new Belgian safety regulations for estuary vessels by means of a non-linear approach taking account the effect of a combination of beam waves and unsteady beam wind. The results presented are based on a solid, scientific background, and the author’s approach as published in former papers can be considered as the base of a promising methodology for evaluating the stability and safety of a vessel in waves and wind. As the discusser has supported the Belgian federal authorities in defining the methodology and formulating the present regulations, it is a pleasure to learn that the implementation of the latter is considered as a significant step in the general improvement of ship safety regulations.