Dust Scrubber Design—A Critique on the State of the Art

Geographic variation in the prevalence of respiratory disease between communities has been used to incriminate air pollution at low concentrations in the production of disease. Though demographic factors and the design and conduct of survey research affect the validity of these observations, there are other complex factors which are often neglected. From several community studies planned or conducted by the authors, illustrations will be given of the effect of the following six frequently neglected factors: the reliability of the air pollution monitoring network; the validity of the air pollution monitoring network; the competing effect of differential migration of population; the competing effect of occupational pollution of members of the population; the competing effect of socioeconomic factors; and the competing effect of personal air pollution—tobacco smoking.     

Honorary Memberships

Honorary Memberships are conferred by the Air Pollution Control Association on persons of widely recognized eminence in some part of the field of air pollution control or who have rendered especially meritorious service to the Association. Honorary Memberships were awarded this year to Dr. Leonard Greenburg and Mr. Milton Reizenstein, both past presidents of APCA.     

Cooling Towers and the Environment

Measurements of natural draft cooling tower plume behavior, as well as meteorological variables, were obtained from aircraft flights near major power plants of the American Electric Power System. Persistence of the visible plume to great distances depends essentially on ambient humidity. Atmospheric stability at plume elevation was also important. Cooling tower-induced fog at ground-level was never observed in any of the tests, and aerodynamic downwash of the visible plume was absent also. The cooling towers did cause modification of natural clouds and they occasionally shadowed some local areas from the sun. Merging of the stack and cooling tower plumes was a common occurrence.     

Technical Aspects of Lime/Limestone Scrubbers for Coal-Fired Power Plants

This is the conclusion of a 2-part article dealing with the technical aspects of lime/limestone scrubbers for coal-fired power plants, it covers instrumentation, participate removal and sludge disposal. Part I (June JAPCA) covered process chemistry and scrubber systems     

Urban-Center CO Air Quality Projections

The distribution of mutagenic activity and nitroaromatic components of polycyclic organic matter (POM) in ambient air at industrial, urban, suburban, rural, and remote sites was studied using organic extracts from high volume aerosol samples. Direct-acting mutagens including 1-nitropyrene (1-NP), dinitropyrenes (DNP), and hydroxynitropyrenes (HNP) were measured by high performance liquid chromatography while the mutagenicity was determined in the Salmonella bioassay with strain TA-98. Benzo(a)pyrene (BaP), one of the possible precursors of nitroaromatic compounds in POM, was also measured. In comparing samples from a range of sites, TSP and the concentration of BaP per mass of particulate matter decreased, as expected, at greater distances from urban and industrial combustion sources. However, the concentrations of polar nitroaromatic POM compounds per mass of particles were higher at a remote site than in nonindustrial urban and suburban areas. The mutagenicity in particulate matter extracts from the remote area was predominantly (>90 percent) in the very polar fractions. There were also high atmospheric levels of nitroaromatic compounds and mutagenicity in heavily industrialized areas. These observations may reflect the influences of source emissions, atmospheric transformations of POM compounds, and ther atmospheric processes on the composition of ambient suspended particulate matter.     

基于EMD-HHT可定位长输天然气管道第三方破坏事件监测技术

为适应目前管道安全监测需要,满足对扰动信号分类监测的实际需求,提出1种基于希尔伯变换和经验模态分解(EMD-HHT)的信号特征提取技术,利用基于φ-OTDR分布式光纤传感系统采集振动信号,通过EMD+HHT区分算法对管道沿线振动事件进行分解并提取6个典型特征向量,各特征事件数据经过EMD后选取IMF3为最终提取特征向量的原始数据,BP神经元网络可有效识别机械破坏、敲击破坏、车辆经过、人工挖掘、动力干扰5种事件。研究结果表明：在长输管道信号识别中,BP神经网络对5类事件平均识别率高达98.6%,该技术分类识别5类事件扰动信号,能够达到较高准确性,并且误报率平均在1.3%,能较好满足现场安全实时监测需求。研究结果对长输油气管道附近第三方破坏扰动信号分类监测具有一定参考意义。     

Development of a test method against hot alkaline chemical splashes.

High temperature alkaline chemical liquids have caused injuries and hazardous situations in Finnish pulp manufacturing mills. There are no requirements and/or test method standards concerning protection against high temperature alkaline chemical splashes. This paper describes the test method development process to test and identify materials appropriate for hot liquid chemical hazard protection. In the first phase, the liquid was spilled through a stainless steel funnel and the protection performance was evaluated using a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) film under the test material. After several tentative improvements, a graphite crucible was used for heating and spilling the chemical, and a copper-coated K-type thermometer with 4 independent measuring areas was designed to measure the temperature under the material samples. The thermometer was designed to respond quickly so that peak temperatures could be measured. The main problem was to keep the spilled amount of chemical constant, which unfortunately resulted in significant variability in data.     

儿童在道路行驶中的安全与防护——加拿大新的儿童汽车座椅法规与测试方法

本文主要介绍加拿大新的《机动车辆约束系统和加高座椅安全法规》（SOR/2011-16）的相关内容,同时对儿童汽车座椅的研究与测试方法也进行了详细描述,以对我国相关行业提供借鉴。     

Heart rate variability and motion sickness during forklift simulator driving

The goal of the study was to determine the effect of a 1-h hour long forklift truck virtual simulator driving on the mechanism of autonomic heart rate (HR) regulation in operators. The participants were divided into 2 subgroups: subjects with no definite inclination to motion sickness (group A) and subjects with a definite inclination to motion sickness (group B). Holter monitoring of electrocardiogram (ECG) signal was carried out in all subjects during the virtual simulator driving. For 12 consecutive epochs of ECG signal, HR variability analysis was conducted in time and frequency domains. In subjects with a definite inclination to motion sickness after ~30 min of the driving, changes in parameter values were found indicating an increase in sympathetic and parasympathetic activity with parasympathetic dominance.     

New approach to calculate the probability of ignition

The probabilistic approach to the evaluation of fire hazard and the effectiveness of fire-precaution measures enables a rational response to the randomness of fire outbreaks. This article employs the statistical analysis methods to elucidate the causes for the ignition of fire on a random sample of industrial buildings in the Republic of Slovenia. The analyses are based on the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), which is a well established and important statistical analysis technique in the fields of social science, biology, psychology and medicine, but hitherto rarely applied in safety research. The results of the study demonstrate that for the analyzed random sample of industrial buildings the frequency of fire outbreaks statistically significantly depends only on the presence and the probability of exposure to the heat sources (flames, sparks, and hot surfaces), but does not significantly depend on the available quantity of flammable materials within the industrial structure.