情绪特质对建筑工人危险感知的差异化影响

为更深入地揭示情绪特质对建筑工人危险感知行为的影响规律,减少事故发生,立足中国建筑工人的群体与个体特质,以情绪等相关理论为支撑,基于自主开发的“情绪特质-危险感知”问卷,利用科学统计方法与指标,探究了不同情绪特质下工人的危险感知行为差异。结果表明:工人的危险感知能力与情绪特质呈正相关,良好的情绪管理能力有利于增强工人危险感知能力;情绪特质最直接影响工人危险知觉水平,情绪化的工人危险知觉水平偏弱;工人良好的情绪管理能力对危险认知有显著影响,最显著体现为提高工人信息分析稳定性。     

Life style and home environment are associated with racial disparities of asthma and allergy in Northeast Texas children

A high prevalence and racial disparities in asthma and allergy have been observed in American children. This study aimed to identify risk factors for asthma and allergy among children, and their contribution to racial disparities in allergy prevalence. A population-based cross-sectional study was carried out among children aged 1-8 years in Northeast Texas 2008-2009. The health conditions, life style and home environment of 3766 children were surveyed by parental questionnaires through e.g. daycares, elementary school, and medical clinics. Among participants who indicated their ethnicity, 255 were Mexican-Americans, 178 Afro-Americans and 969 Caucasians. Afro-American children had a significantly higher prevalence of asthma and eczema. Caucasian had the highest prevalence of rhinitis. Compared to Mexican-American children, Afro-American and Caucasian children were breast fed shorter time, more often went to day care center, had pets and environmental tobacco smoke exposure at home more often. For all children, being at a day care center, being exposed to dampness and environmental tobacco smoke at home were strong risk factors for asthma and allergy. Central air conditioning system was associated with an increased prevalence of wheeze among Mexican-American children, while pets were associated with an increased risk of rhinitis among Afro-American and Caucasian children. Caucasian children were generally not healthier than relatively poor Mexican-American children. Differences in the prevalence of asthma and allergy between races cannot be explained by socioeconomic status only. Life style and home environmental exposures are important risk factors for asthma and allergy in Northeast Texas children.     

Development of an optimal design aid system based on building information modeling

This study proposes an optimal building design aid system that integrates computer aided design (CAD), building environmental simulation tools and an optimization algorithm, based on the concept of building information modeling (BIM). BIM is a process of generating and managing data during a building’s life cycle. It can be used to demonstrate the entire building’s life cycle, including its construction and operation. Because the design of a build may vary from an abstract shape to precise details, the building’s database should vary accordingly. To store, manage and utilize the building’s data efficiently, we suggest an evolving database structure for our design aid system. A case study verifies that the system can acquire data from CAD, run a number of simulations and generate Pareto solutions automatically during several design stages.     

室内燃气安全系统可靠性分析

本文从室内燃气事故的起因出发,提出预防与处理室内燃气事故的方法与措施,以此为基础构建室内燃气安全系统。利用可靠性工程原理,解释各个可靠性分析指标,并且推导出描述可靠度与故障率之间关系的数学表达式,然后在简单串联与并联不可修复系统可靠性分析的基础上,对所构建室内燃气安全系统在恒定型故障率时的各个类型进行可靠性分析与比较,得出相关结论。     

Analytical and comparative testing of EnergyPlus using IEA HVAC BESTEST E100–E200 test suite

The EnergyPlus building energy simulation software has been tested using the IEA HVAC BESTEST E100–E200 series of tests. The volume 1 final report for the International Energy Agency (IEA) solar heating and cooling programme task 22 building energy simulation test and diagnostic method for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning equipment models (HVAC BESTEST) was recently published in January 2002. HVAC BESTEST is a series of steady-state tests for a single-zone DX cooling system. Cases range from dry to wet coil, low to high part load, and low to high temperatures. This published test suite includes three sets of analytical solutions and results from several other simulation programs for comparison.This test suite was initially used to test EnergyPlus beginning with beta versions prior to its official public release, and it is also applied as an ongoing quality assurance test. The application of these tests proved to be very useful in several ways:

• •revealed input model shortcomings, which resulted in new user inputs being added;
• •revealed reporting errors which were fixed;
• •revealed algorithmic errors which were fixed;
• •revealed algorithmic shortcomings which were improved or eliminated through the use of more rigorous calculations for certain components;
• •in later versions, caught newly introduced bugs before public release of updates.

Overall, the application of this test suite has been extremely useful in debugging and verifying the DX cooling algorithms in EnergyPlus. This paper summarizes the difficulties encountered and the benefits gained in applying the tests.     

Seismic performance of repaired hollow-bridge piers

To develop an effective repair technique for rapid bridge restoration after an earthquake, four hollow bridge columns were cyclically loaded to failure, repaired and retested. The repair process includes using dog-bone shape bars to replace the fractured longitudinal bars in plastic hinges and using FRP (Fiber Reinforced Plastic) wraps to enhance the deformation capacity of columns. The repair aims to restore seismic capacity in terms of strength and ductility. Test results indicate that the fractured longitudinal bars can be completely repaired and the deformation capacities of the columns were enhanced by FRP wraps. However, due to concrete deterioration and the buckling of the longitudinal bars in the inner layer of the hollow sections, the test results also indicate the repaired column strengths are less than anticipated.     

A fluorescence chemosensor for benzonitrile derived from in-situ synthesis of azolate–carboxylic acid and zinc(II) ions

A new zinc(II) homometallic coordination polymer (CP), {[Zn(TAA-OH)₂] · 1.5H₂O}_n (1) (HTAA-OH = 2-(5-hydroxy-1H-1,2,4-triazole-1-yl) acetic acid) has been synthesized via an in-situ synthetic approach and structurally characterized in detail. In 1, the HTAA-OH ligand is generated in-situ by the nucleophilic addition of 2-(1H-1,2,4-triazole-1-yl) acetic acid. CP 1 features a 2D structure with sql topology, where the neighboring Zn(II) ions are bridged through two oxygen atoms of carboxyl group and two nitrogen atoms of triazole from the HTAA-OH ligands. Luminescence study shows that 1 dispersed in acetonitrile performs a distinct luminescence enhancing effect upon addition of benzonitrile, indicating that 1 is a promising fluorescence chemosensor for benzonitrile.     

Governance choices and policy outcomes in the Latin American and caribbean electricity sector

The paper first provides, for Latin America and the Caribbean, country-specific synthetic quantitative measures of the degree of adoption of governance reforms in the electricity sector, focusing on four key dimensions (market structure, private sector participation (PSP), regulatory autonomy and operational organization). These measures are then correlated with standard policy performance outcomes measures. The findings suggest that, the reforms, considered jointly, were statistically significantly associated with higher technical and process quality but not with social or service improvements. Considered individually, increased regulatory autonomy enjoyed the highest positive correlation with desirable outcomes, but PSP has no significant correlation with any of the outcomes. In sum, as of 2018, governance reforms, considered jointly, had still not delivered on some promised payoffs, notably in addressing energy poverty, although the sensitivity analysis suggests that, for some indicators, the relationships are stronger for larger than for smaller countries.     

A simplified method for optimal design of solar water heating systems based on life-cycle energy analysis

Significant energy mismatch exists in solar water heating systems as the time and amount of solar energy supply are usually different from that of hot water demand. Using a hot water storage tank can reduce or eliminate such mismatch in short term while it is difficult to avoid this mismatch in long term. In many optimal design and life-cycle analysis methods, the energy mismatch is ignored which causes the system performance to be overestimated and also misleads the optimal design of the system. This paper presents a simplified method for optimizing the key parameters of solar water heating systems based on life-cycle energy analysis. This optimal method considering the energy mismatch phenomenon can be implemented through two steps. In the first step, a simplified energy model based hourly energy matching different components of the system, is developed for determining the operating performance of system with different solar collector areas and water storage volumes. In the second step, the law of diminishing marginal utility is employed to determine the optimum size of the system. The optimum size is identified when the maximal life-cycle net energy saving is achieved. A case study on the application of the proposed method in a building is presented as well.     

Deriving high-resolution urban air pollution maps using mobile sensor nodes

Up-to-date information on urban air pollution is of great importance for environmental protection agencies to assess air quality and provide advice to the general public in a timely manner. In particular, ultrafine particles (UFPs) are widely spread in urban environments and may have a severe impact on human health. However, the lack of knowledge about the spatio-temporal distribution of UFPs hampers profound evaluation of these effects. In this paper, we analyze one of the largest spatially resolved UFP data set publicly available today containing over 50 million measurements. We collected the measurements throughout more than two years using mobile sensor nodes installed on top of public transport vehicles in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. Based on these data, we develop land-use regression models to create pollution maps with a high spatial resolution of 100 m × 100 m. We compare the accuracy of the derived models across various time scales and observe a rapid drop in accuracy for maps with sub-weekly temporal resolution. To address this problem, we propose a novel modeling approach that incorporates past measurements annotated with metadata into the modeling process. In this way, we achieve a 26% reduction in the root-mean-square error–a standard metric to evaluate the accuracy of air quality models–of pollution maps with semi-daily temporal resolution. We believe that our findings can help epidemiologists to better understand the adverse health effects related to UFPs and serve as a stepping stone towards detailed real-time pollution assessment.