Identification of fire gases in early stages of fire in laboratory scaled and full scale fire experiments

A series of reduced scale emulations of standard fires in a 2 m3 enclosure have been developed for studies at laboratory scale enabling useful comparison and correlation with full scale EN54/7 and UL268 test fires. This makes study of standard test fire conditions and products substantially more accessible. The reduced scale test fire emulations have smoke obscuration characteristics matched to the fire standards and show acceptable matching of experimental CO levels Sensor, fire detector, and analytical studies have been carried out on test fires in the 2 m3 enclosure and in a full scale test room. Protocols were developed for capture of gas and vapours from fires on absorbent media and their subsequently desorption and analysis by GC/MS techniques. A data set of GC chromatograms has been generated for full and reduced scale test fires and for a number of non standard fire or false alarm related process including overheating of cooking oils and toasting bread. Analysis of mass spectrometry ion fragmentation spectra has been carried out and a wide range of products identified. Products occurring for a range of different fires include propene, benzene, and some polyaromatics. The value of the scaled test fire emulations has been demonstrated by monitoring response of a range of sensors, detectors and instruments including electrochemical gas sensor, experimental and conventional light scattering smoke detectors, and ion mobility measurement equipment (FAIMS). The study has provided information on fire characteristics and products to inform future research and development on fire detection technologies

Modeling and analysis of hospital facility layout problem

The optimal solution to any facility layout problem is an important aspect and a major concem as it involves significant material handling and transportation cost. The objective is to arrange the departments within the predefined facility boundaries in the way that the interaction between the functions is efficient and the overall movement cost is minimized. While facility layout problems have traditionally focused on manufacturing facilities, there has been little work on analyzing layouts for hospitals. The thesis focuses on hospital facility layout problems (HLP) to (i) minimize the movements of patients and (ii) minimize the movements of accompanying resources such as doctors, nurses, equipment and paramedical staff. The thesis consists of two sections. In the first section, a model for the multi-floor layout problem is presented based on the minimization of movement cost. The model has travel frequency or number of trips, trip difficulty rating, baseline travel cost and distance as parameters for determining the movement cost. In the second section, some additional parameters and constraints are imposed on the model and it is simulated using Microsoft Excel. Simulations are also run to study the effect of different proposed strategies on movement cost. These proposed strategies show a reduction in movement cost from the sample layout strategy in section one. A representative example is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed formulation

Европейский и национальный контексты в научных исследованиях

В настоящем электронном сборнике «Европейский и национальный контексты в научных исследованиях. Технология» представлены работы молодых ученых по геодезии и картографии, химической технологии и машиностроению, информационным технологиям, строительству и радиотехнике. Предназначены для работников образования, науки и производства. Будут полезны студентам, магистрантам и аспирантам университетов.=In this Electronic collected materials “National and European dimension in research. Technology” works in the fields of geodesy, chemical technology, mechanical engineering, information technology, civil engineering, and radio-engineering are presented. It is intended for trainers, researchers and professionals. It can be useful for university graduate and post-graduate students

Veblen on medicine: a sociological analysis of the cultural and organizational development of medicine as a social institution

The focus of this dissertation is to provide a cultural and organizational analysis of the development of medicine as viewed through the theoretical tenets of Thorstein Veblen, one of our most brilliant social and economic theorists. I trace the historical development, examine the current status, and project the future trends of our medical institution. I explore how our current medical system has evolved, both culturally and organizationally, along the same path that Veblen set forth in his social and economic theories of instincts, status emulation, ceremonial-technological dichotomy, and business and market capitalism. I include his thoughts on the development of institutions and the ways in which cultural lag impedes progress. To accomplish this, I rely heavily on theoretical discussion, interpretative analysis of secondary data, and qualitative analysis of current medical issues. As a result, I discover that the development of medicine as a social institution has followed a predictable course; one that reflects a cultural and organizational dilemma created by the profit motive, which restricts the implementation of technological advances and negatively impacts the health of our nation. I find that the ability to view a modern day social institution, such as medicine, through the lens of theories that were at the forefront of social and economic thought at the beginning of the twentieth century, provides us with a unique perspective; the insight to better understand exactly why that development occurred. With that understanding, we are better equipped to alter future development thereby improving structures, processes, policies, and procedures. This research focuses on exposing not only how the institution of medicine evolved but, more importantly, what we can do to improve the delivery of health care and the overall health of our nation’s population

Identification of fire gases in early stages of fire in laboratory scaled and full scale fire experiments

A series of reduced scale emulations of standard fires in a 2 m3 enclosure have been developed for studies at laboratory scale enabling useful comparison and correlation with full scale EN54/7 and UL268 test fires. This makes study of standard test fire conditions and products substantially more accessible. The reduced scale test fire emulations have smoke obscuration characteristics matched to the fire standards and show acceptable matching of experimental CO levels Sensor, fire detector, and analytical studies have been carried out on test fires in the 2 m3 enclosure and in a full scale test room. Protocols were developed for capture of gas and vapours from fires on absorbent media and their subsequently desorption and analysis by GC/MS techniques. A data set of GC chromatograms has been generated for full and reduced scale test fires and for a number of non standard fire or false alarm related process including overheating of cooking oils and toasting bread. Analysis of mass spectrometry ion fragmentation spectra has been carried out and a wide range of products identified. Products occurring for a range of different fires include propene, benzene, and some polyaromatics. The value of the scaled test fire emulations has been demonstrated by monitoring response of a range of sensors, detectors and instruments including electrochemical gas sensor, experimental and conventional light scattering smoke detectors, and ion mobility measurement equipment (FAIMS). The study has provided information on fire characteristics and products to inform future research and development on fire detection technologies.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Essays on Public Economics and Public Policy Evaluation – Methods and Applications

[eng] Economic policies and institutional design and decision-making vary greatly accross countries. Germany, the US and Canada, are federal states, where decision-making and economic policies are highly decentralized, while France and Greece are highly unitary countries. Belgium has had the two largest government formation deadlocks in Europe in the last 20 years, while other countries such as Portugal or Ireland have experienced none. During the COVID-19 crisis, some countries, like New Zealand, applied lockdowns with an incidence rate of 20 cases per milion inhabitants, while others like Spain, delayer their response until the incidence rate was higher than 130 cases per million Do differences in institutional design lead to differences in economic policies? Can these differences be explained? Is the agility of government decision-making influenced by common patterns across countries? The aim of my thesis is to contribute to the existing literature on public policy evaluation, with a particular focus on the role of institutions, providing new methodological, theoretical, and empirical results, to provide answers to questions such as the ones stated before. Five studies are presented in the thesis. In the first study, I analyze one of the most seminals questions that could be asked about governments and economic outcomes: Do government formation deadlocks affect the economy in the short term? From the methodological point of view, I develop a proposal to improve current methodologies to evaluate causal effects on quasi-experimental designs; concretely, the Synthetic Control Method. I illustrate the main advantages of the proposal evaluating the causal economic effects of the ten-month-long government formation impasse in Spain, after the December 2015 elections, as well as reproducing two previous studies: the impact of German reunification (analyzed in Abadie et al. 2015) and the effect of tobacco control programs in California (Abadie et al. 2010). In line with the results obtained by Albalate and Bel (2020) for the 18-month government formation deadlock in Belgium, my estimates indicate that the growth rate in Spain was not affected by the government deadlock, ruling out any damage to the economy attributable to the institutional impasse. The second and third studies focus on how governments decide in a context of high uncertainty and different degrees of information. Concretely, I build a theoretical model to assess the agility of government response to the COVID pandemic and evaluate the model empirically using data from OCDE and European countries. I find solid evidence that during the first outbreak, in a context of incomplete information, the agility of policy response was highly conditioned by a cost-benefit analysis where the perceived healthcare capacity to deal with the outbreak, and the associated economic costs of lockdown measures, significantly delayed the response. Institution design also played a role: federal states reacted faster than unitary ones. Higher competition in multilevel systems with collaborative governance between different levels of government and non-state institutions - (Scavo, Kearne, and Kilroy, 2008; Schwartz and Yen, 2017; Downey and Myers, 2020; Huang, 2020) provided incentives for more agile and effective responses. However, federal states could be dysfunctional in terms of internal coordination and suffer from high inequality in terms of agility within themselves. For the concrete case of the US, I find that Republican-controlled states reacted later and implemented softer contingency measures, which were associated with higher growth in the number of COVID-19 cases (Hallas et al., 2020; Shvetsova et al., 2022). The highly polarized context of the US provided incentives for Republican governors to align with President Trump’s preferred policy, which was to avoid lockdowns. These incentives vanished during the vaccination process, when information about the severity of COVID-19 was complete, and governors, no matter whether Republicans or Democrats, implemented the roll-out of the vaccination program with a similar level of agility. In the fourth paper, I suggest a new approach to assess the effect of institutional and policy developments (i.e. capital city) on economic growth that distort the natural equilibrium of the geographical distribution of the labor market. I propose a theoretical model of the way in which features of geography and nature can account for population density and distribution within a country. The model is empirically examined using data from comparable European regions. This allows us to detect deviations produced by the forces of human action, led mainly by institutions, and to evaluate the consequences in terms of relative economic performance. The results suggest that deviating from nature’s outcomes has a significant negative effect on economic growth and regional convergence. Hence, societies that choose to exploit the opportunities of the best locations, according to the natural endowment, rather than promoting a different distribution of the population across regions by means of institutional intervention, achieve better economic performance. In the last study, we focus on the most relevant government expenditure until the twentieth century: military expenditure. We examine the effects of military and trade alliances in military expenditure. We develop a theoretical model to understand why these alliances could influence military expenditure. In short, when countries build military and trade alliances with military leaders such as the US, they make themselves more valuable to the leader, and hence increase the likelihood of the leader providing military aid in case of an agression. This increases the military costs of a potential agresor, reduces the probability of war and let the non-leader country reduce its military expenditure. To empirically test the hypothesis derived from the model we employ data of 138 countries for the period 1996-2020. Our results show that trade relation with a military leader is a highly significant driver of military expenditure. For each percentage point in US GDP in trade between a certain country and the US, the military expenditure of the country reduces 0.5 percentage points. Moreover, when the trade balance is particularly beneficial for the US, the effect is even larger

Cultivating Knowledge: The Production and Adaptation of Knowledge on Organic and GM Cotton Farms in Telangana, India

This dissertation explores the ways in which genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds, rice seeds, and organic cotton seeds in Telangana, India set farmers on diverging economic, environmental, and social trajectories. GM cotton, a cash crop sold under hundreds of different brand names by private corporations, leads farmers to rapidly change to new seeds and copy their neighbors’ choices as they chase high yields that counter their high investments in an input-intensive agriculture. Rice, a subsistence and market crop distributed largely by public breeders, allows farmers to change their seeds more slowly as they carefully evaluate durability and taste alongside overall yield. Organic cotton seeds, often provided free of cost by sponsoring NGOs or ethical fiber companies, show farmers that agricultural cost-benefit analysis can be less important than learning to work in tandem with a sponsoring organization. The solutions to agrarian crisis or underdevelopment are often presented as a series of technological fixes. However, agriculture is a fundamentally social act, hinging on the ways in which farmers learn to manage their fields. Taking individual seeds as a lens, I use ethnographic detail and quantitative analysis to study how farmers learn to navigate confusing seed markets, state programs, ethical supply chains, and the village hierarchies that determine who looks to whom for agricultural advice. This work has implications for international development as well as a broader question of modern life: how do we make technologies sustainable in new contexts

Discrete Event Simulations

Considered by many authors as a technique for modelling stochastic, dynamic and discretely evolving systems, this technique has gained widespread acceptance among the practitioners who want to represent and improve complex systems. Since DES is a technique applied in incredibly different areas, this book reflects many different points of view about DES, thus, all authors describe how it is understood and applied within their context of work, providing an extensive understanding of what DES is. It can be said that the name of the book itself reflects the plurality that these points of view represent. The book embraces a number of topics covering theory, methods and applications to a wide range of sectors and problem areas that have been categorised into five groups. As well as the previously explained variety of points of view concerning DES, there is one additional thing to remark about this book: its richness when talking about actual data or actual data based analysis. When most academic areas are lacking application cases, roughly the half part of the chapters included in this book deal with actual problems or at least are based on actual data. Thus, the editor firmly believes that this book will be interesting for both beginners and practitioners in the area of DES