Sustainable environmental geotechnics practices for a green economy

The revitalisation of the global economy after the Covid-19 era presents environmental geotechnics with the opportunity to reinforce the need for a change in paradigm towards a green, circular economy and to promote aggressively the use and development of sustainable technologies and management practices. This paper aims to assist in this effort by concentrating on several thematic areas where sustainability solutions and future improvements are sought. These include the re-entry of construction and demolition of wastes, excavated materials, industrial wastes and marine sediments into the production cycle and the reuse of existing foundations. Despite the recent trend in advanced countries towards recycling and waste-to-energy thermal treatment, landfills still constitute the most common municipal solid waste management practice, especially in low-and-middle-income countries, and technological solutions to improve their environmental footprint are hereby presented. At the same time, remediation solutions are required to address the multitude of contaminated sites worldwide. Advanced developments that incorporate environmental, economic and social dimensions are expounded by the authors, together with sustainable ground improvement solutions for infrastructure projects conducted in soft and weak soils. The topic of thermo-active geostructures concludes this paper, where, apart from their infrastructure utility, these structures have the potential to contribute to the renewable energy source.Published versionThe second author would like to acknowledge the support of the Office of the Associate Provost for Research and Academic Development at Abu Dhabi University, UAE through grant19300540

Using semantic clustering to support situation awareness on Twitter: The case of World Views

In recent years, situation awareness has been recognised as a critical part of effective decision making, in particular for crisis management. One way to extract value and allow for better situation awareness is to develop a system capable of analysing a dataset of multiple posts, and clustering consistent posts into different views or stories (or, world views). However, this can be challenging as it requires an understanding of the data, including determining what is consistent data, and what data corroborates other data. Attempting to address these problems, this article proposes Subject-Verb-Object Semantic Suffix Tree Clustering (SVOSSTC) and a system to support it, with a special focus on Twitter content. The novelty and value of SVOSSTC is its emphasis on utilising the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) typology in order to construct semantically consistent world views, in which individuals---particularly those involved in crisis response---might achieve an enhanced picture of a situation from social media data. To evaluate our system and its ability to provide enhanced situation awareness, we tested it against existing approaches, including human data analysis, using a variety of real-world scenarios. The results indicated a noteworthy degree of evidence (e.g., in cluster granularity and meaningfulness) to affirm the suitability and rigour of our approach. Moreover, these results highlight this article's proposals as innovative and practical system contributions to the research field

Methods of pressure pulsation and vibration analysis in industrial network for gas transmission

W pracy przedstawiono współczesne metody analizy pulsacji ciśnienia oraz drgań w sieci przemysłowej do przesyłu gazu. Zjawisko pulsacji ciśnienia gazu jest niekorzystne ze względu na zwiększenie kosztów procesu sprężania oraz generowanie hałasu. Ponadto pulsacja wywołuje drgania mechaniczne konstrukcji, co może skutkować uszkodzeniem lub zniszczeniem elementów instalacji. W celu zapobieżenia niekontrolowanej pulsacji ciśnienia gazu niezbędne jest projektowanie sieci przemysłowych zgodnie z określonymi wytycznymi. Niestety aktualne normy nie uwzględniają obligatoryjnych obliczeń pulsacji ciśnienia i drgań, w związku z czym podjęto prace rozwojowo-badawcze nad opracowaniem metodyki obliczeń, pozwalające na prawidłową ocenę wytężenia konstrukcji w warunkach rzeczywistych.The paper presents the modern methods of pressure pulsation and vibration analysis in industrial networks for natural gas transportation. Gas pressure pulsation phenomena is disadvantageous due to the cost increase of the compression process and the generation of noise. Furthermore, pulsation causes mechanical vibration of the construction, which can result in damage or destruction of installation components. In order to prevent uncontrolled gas pressure pulsation, it is necessary to design industrial networks in accordance with specified guidelines. Unfortunately, current standards do not take into account the mandatory calculations of pressure pulsation and vibration, therefore the scientific research was undertaken to develop the calculation methodology allowing for a proper assessment of the construction effort in the real operation conditions