New Photo-Thermo-Refractive Glasses for Holographic Optical Elements: Properties and Applications

This chapter presents a survey of recent achievements of the ITMO University (St. Petersburg, Russia) in developing new holographic media such as fluoride, chloride, and bromide silicate photo-thermo-refractive (PTR) glasses as well as the holographic diffractive optical elements that are the volume Bragg gratings recorded in the glasses for improving dramatically the parameters of laser systems of different types. The photo-thermo-induced crystallization process and the properties of fluoride, chloride, and bromide PTR glasses are demonstrated. This new technology enabled recording high-efficiency phase volume holograms in the optical quality silicate glass. These holograms are used for developing a number of unique diffractive optical elements that provide new opportunities for the laser technique. Some examples of designing and fabricating of holographic optical elements such as the super-narrowband filters for solid-state lasers and laser diodes, laser beam combiners, and collimator sights are demonstrated in this chapter. It is shown that the PTR glass doped with rare earth ions can be used for designing lasers with Bragg reflectors and distributed feedback

Low-carbon development of Russia: problems and prospects

This publication presents the results of research aiming to study the possibilities of promoting measures that could help reduce the impact on climate by replacing fossil fuels with alternative, carbon-free (renewable) energy sources, and implementing technological innovations. The study examines long-term scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions in Russia and their implications for the environment, public health and other spheres. Based on the results of the analysis, it offers recommendations on possible strategies to mitigate the impact on climate over the periods up to 2030 and 2050. These recommendations can serve the purpose of designing policies that will contribute to the implementation of the international climate agreement adopted in December 2015 at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in Paris

Chinese experience in implementing renewable energy sources as a possible scenario for the Krasnoyarsk Territory

Renewable energy is a rapidly developing area of the modern economy. As many experts forecast, global electricity consumption will double by 2050, while the share of renewable sources in energy generation will be 50%. For most states, the main incentives for the development of renewable energy are the ability to eliminate the consumption of fossil fuels and reduce the level of emissions of pollutants, while ensuring sustainable development of the country. At the same time, Russia, which has significant reserves of natural resources, is in no hurry to switch to the use of energy from renewable sources since it is believed that the country’s subsoil can provide it with cheap energy resources for many generations to come. Therefore, introduction of renewable energy sources that are unable to compete with traditional energy without a developed energy infrastructure and established production is impractical. In our study we try to evaluate the efficiency of the introduction of renewable energy sources in the Krasnoyarsk Territory of Russia using the example of the Chinese experience

NSR and NSTC projects: environmental and economic efficiency assessment of the goods’ overseas transportation

The authors attempt to assess the environmental and economic efficiency of investment projects for the goods transportation by the northern seas of Russia taking into account the relevance of the topic of cargo transportation by means of the “Northern Sea Route” (NSR) and new concept of the digital format of the “Northern Sea Transit Corridor” (NSTC) implemented by the “Rosatom” State Corporation. The structure of import-export and transit traffic by the NSR in 2020 is considered. The goal of the article is to evaluate the efficiency of investment project for the goods transportation forwards and backwards by the NSR from Murmansk city to PetropavlovskKamchatsky city using the example of the “Andrey Osipov” shipping facility. Some indicators were assessed: planned revenue, payback period; NPV, environmental damage. The following results are obtained: the payback period is 10 years; by using the naval fuel oil over a ten-year period, 1101.6 tons of SOx, 143.1 tons of CO2, 288.9 tons of NOx will be emitted. In addition, the authors propose an innovative approach to creation of ships from new materials and technologies based on the modern paradigm of “Accelerated Digital Certification”

Calculation of Sustainability Indicators for Water Objects based on the Example of Water Use in the Arctic Basin of the Yenisei River

In the article, the fractal approach to the description of nonequilibrium water ecosystems in their exploitation conditions is considered. The article demonstrates clearly that, in these conditions, the management of the development of water objects should be a precautionary provision, which should furthermore be reduced to the management of potential anthropogenic risks arising from a violation of the coevolution of anthropogenic and natural processes equivalent to the disruption in sustainability of the ecosystem in its exploitation conditions. The fractal approach opens up new opportunities for the assessment of water management based on the calculation of the fractal sustainability indicator (anthropogenic transformation) for water ecosystems that is directly related to the maximum permissible environmental load (MPEL)

Producing Synthetic Dataset for Human Fall Detection in AR/VR Environments

Human poses and the behaviour estimation for different activities in (virtual reality/augmented reality) VR/AR could have numerous beneficial applications. Human fall monitoring is especially important for elderly people and for non-typical activities with VR/AR applications. There are a lot of different approaches to improving the fidelity of fall monitoring systems through the use of novel sensors and deep learning architectures; however, there is still a lack of detail and diverse datasets for training deep learning fall detectors using monocular images. The issues with synthetic data generation based on digital human simulation were implemented and examined using the Unreal Engine. The proposed pipeline provides automatic “playback” of various scenarios for digital human behaviour simulation, and the result of a proposed modular pipeline for synthetic data generation of digital human interaction with the 3D environments is demonstrated in this paper. We used the generated synthetic data to train the Mask R-CNN-based segmentation of the falling person interaction area. It is shown that, by training the model with simulation data, it is possible to recognize a falling person with an accuracy of 97.6% and classify the type of person’s interaction impact. The proposed approach also allows for covering a variety of scenarios that can have a positive effect at a deep learning training stage in other human action estimation tasks in an VR/AR environment

Assessment of the Investment Appeal of Hydropower Construction Based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process

The purpose of the paper is description of the method of estimating the investment appeal rate of hydropower construction in the federal subjects. The method is based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). According to the method every federal subject is estimated by the decision-maker. The authors collected data for this study from Russian Federal State Statistics Service, the Federal Subjects Development Programs and the Power Industry Development Programs of the federal subjects (23 indicators). The federal subjects were estimated according to these indicators. As a result of this project every estimated federal subject has status: attractive, relatively attractive and non-attractive for hydropower development. The results can be applied to calculate the economic hydropower potential. The method was tested for detecting the attractive federal subjects of the Volga Federal District, North Caucasian Federal District, Northwestern Federal District, Siberian Federal District for hydropower development

Modeling of Hydrophysical Properties of the Soil as Capillary-Porous Media and Improvement of Mualem-Van Genuchten Method as a Part of Foundation Arrangement Research

Within the concepts about the capillarity and the lognormal distribution of effective pore radii, a theoretical justification for function of differential water capacity and its antiderivative (function of water-retention capacity in form of a dependence of the soil volumetric water content on capillary pressure of the soil moisture) is presented. Using these functions, the ratio of soil hydraulic conductivity function to the filter coefficient is calculated. Approximations to functions describing the water-retention capacity and relative hydraulic conductivity of the soil have been suggested. Parameters of these functions have been interpreted and estimated with applying the physical and statistical indices of the soil