COUNTERING CLIMATE CHANGE BY PROTECTING THE ATMOSPHERE FROM ANTHROPOGENIC GASES AND CREATING ARTIFICIAL SOURCES OF FRESH WATER

The activities of mankind in the past at least 70 years have led to the disruption of the planet's ecosystem with the prospect of serious consequences for life on Earth. To start at least slow down their action, only global scientific and technical solutions with very short periods of their implementation are needed. The article proposes to carry out the separation of fumes before their emission into the atmosphere, during which, to carry out the selection of greenhouse and toxic components of fumes, with the aim of their further utilization or neutralization. Protecting the atmosphere from smoke and eliminating the shortage of freshwater are purely technical areas that will not create unsolvable problems for the modern scientific and technical potential of mankind. All that is needed is a proactive management, ideologically aimed at solving these technical problems in an emergency mode.

Optimization of Phase Determining Method for Automatic Transfer Switch Operation Based on Simulated Annealing

Fast reserve supply input systems significantly increase the reliability of power supply due to the possibility of preserving the technological process in case of emergency situations. The accuracy of determining the phase of the residual voltage on the busbar in process of connecting the power reserve supply provides a way to significantly reduce the starting overcurrents. In this paper, some modifications of the annealing method for determining the phase of the residual voltage on main section of busbar for emergency mode are considered. The obtained simulation results based on MATLAB environment make it possible to carry out a comparative analysis of a number of calculations for phase estimation design of automatic transfer switch operations based on simulated annealing.

A CASE STUDY ON STUDENTS’ REASONS FOR NOT SWITCHING ON THEIR CAMERAS DURING ONLINE CLASS SESSIONS

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought academic face-to-face classes to a halt, globally. Schools, higher institutions, and all learning centres were forced into emergency mode searching for platforms to ensure the continuity of teaching and learning (UNESCO, 2020). Online classes were made mandatory, and instructors curated lessons to best deliver their lessons. However, frustrations emerged where teachers shared their experience of talking to the abyss of their computer screens as students did not switch on their cameras during online lessons. A link to a Google form questionnaire which is quantitative (questionnaire), qualitative (short answer questions) in nature was given to the author’s communicative English class students. Fifty students in an English communicative course responded and the chairperson of the course was interviewed (qualitative) to find challenges teachers faced in their online classes. The author focused on one issue - students’ refusal to turn on their cameras. The findings revealed the main reasons for not turning on the cameras during lessons as lack of internet data, poor internet connection, social norms, not being physically presentable, and not being comfortable to be looked at by peers. Instructions from teachers and class assessments affect students’ choice to turn on the camera, too. These findings serve as knowledge contributions for teachers to understand students and to do content curation.

IMPROVING FPGA COMPONENTS OF CRITICAL SYSTEMS BASED ON NATURAL VERSION REDUNDANCY

The article is devoted to the problem of improving FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) components developed for safety related systems. FPGA components are improved in the checkability of their circuits and the trustworthiness of the results calculated on them to support fault-tolerant solutions, which are basic in ensuring the functional safety of critical systems. Fault-tolerant solu tions need protection from sources of multiple failures, which include hidden faults. They can be accumulated in significant quanti ties during a long normal operation and disrupt the functionality of fault-tolerant circuits with the onset of the most responsible emer gency mode. Protection against hidden faults is ensured by the checkability of the circuits, which is aimed at the manifestation of faults and therefore must be supported in conjunction with the trustworthiness of the results, taking into account the decrease in trustworthiness in the event of the manifestation of faults. The problem of increasing the checkability of the FPGA component in normal operation and the trustworthiness of the results calculated in the emergency mode is solved by using the natural version re dundancy inherent in the LUT-oriented architecture (Look-Up Table). This redundancy is manifested in the existence of many ver sions of the program code that preserve the functionality of the FPGA component with the same hardware implementation. The checkability of the FPGA component and the trustworthiness of the calculated results are considered taking into account the typical failures of the LUT-oriented architecture. These malfunctions are investigated from the standpoint of the consistency of their mani festation and masking, respectively, in normal and emergency modes on versions of the program code. Malfunctions are identified with bit distortion in the memory of the LUT units. Bits that are only observed in emergency mode are potentially dangerous because they can hide faults in normal mode. Moving potentially dangerous bits to checkable positions, observed in normal mode, is per formed by choosing the appropriate versions of the program code and organizing the operation of the FPGA component on several versions. Experiments carried out with the FPGA component using the example of an iterative array multiplier of binary codes have shown the effectiveness of using the natural version redundancy of the LUT-oriented architecture to solve the problem of hidden faults.

Building Pathology and COVID-19: A Literature Review and Commentary on Field Hospital Setting

In 2019, there was an emerging disease, namely Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). This disease firstly emerged in Asia before there was a worldwide spreading. COVID-19 is highly contagious. The pandemic results in more than 100 million infections worldwide (by the end of January 2021). Each country has to have a good public health plan to correspond with the increasing number of the patient. To correspond with the rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 patients, finding for sufficient space for patient care is needed. The presently available number of hospitals might be limited and it usually requires an urgent setting of the new building for management of the situation. The field hospital is usually set. In this work, the authors performed a retrospective literature review to summarize the available data on building pathology and COVID-19. The aim of the study is about the quality of the field hospital buildings and the defects in the buildings. The standard databases, SCOPUS and PubMED are used for literature searching. The derived publications are summarized and extracted for a conclusion. According to the literature analysis, there are very few publications on the topic of building pathology of a field hospital for COVID-19 containment. The role of field hospital in outbreak management is confirmed in thee literature. However, the specific report regarding building pathology of field hospital is limited. The newly constructed field hospital is usually in the rapid emergency mode. Based on the present analysis, it can show that there is a lack of concern on building pathology of the field hospital. Due to the rapid construction of field hospitals for COVID-19 outbreak management, the quality control and standardization are important. Further researches on the building pathology and quality management of field hospital are recommended.

Some Tips on Numerical Modeling of Airflow and Fires in Road Tunnels

The efficiency of tunnels systems is often evaluated using numerical simulations. This concerns both to normal and emergency mode of tunnel systems operation. Therefore the safety level of tunnel users may depend on the quality of numerical models being built. The most often studied areas cover the researches on natural and forced airflows in the normal mode and on fire development and smoke spreading in the emergency mode as well as modeling of fan operation. Thus, many software packages implementing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are applied here. Despite the available software is recognized as reliable, the problem arises because the built numerical models should be validated at least partially with experimental data. There is a shortage of experimental data from real tunnels due to high costs and many organizational or formal difficulties. Some researchers use data from scaled experiments, but this leads to problems connected with scaling. The paper presents the application of two widely used software packages—Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) and ANSYS Fluent to reproduce some scenarios of the operation of a tunnel ventilation system for normal and emergency mode. Most of results were compared with data obtained by own full scale measurements or data available in literature. Some practical issues concerning the application of FDS and ANSYS Fluent were discussed as well.

Analysis of emergency situations on low pressure gas pipelines in case of failure of gas control points

The analysis of malfunctions of the main equipment at gas control points was carried out. It was concluded that for the looped-back part of the low-pressure network, the diameters of adjacent sections should not be significantly different, since if the diameter of one section is less than the neighboring one, then in an emergency mode, a section with a small diameter will not let in the required amount of gas.

Enhancing safety and reliability of electric power supply to consumers through safe electricity networks of up to 1 kV

The study presents an electric network that allows both increasing the level of electrical safety and eliminating one-phase damage to the electrical network without switching off the consumer's electric energy. The application of the network does not require significant investments. The technical feasibility of implementing an electrical installation with voltage values in the emergency mode on the leading parts, which does not exceed the permissible values for normal mode, is demonstrated. An additional advantage of the proposed technical solution is the immutability of the voltage at the customer's outputs, which allows it to operate normally also in the emergency mode of the electrical installation.