An application of a modified theory of planned behavior model to investigate adolescents’ job safety knowledge,norms, attitude and intention to enact workplace safety and health skills

Introduction: For many reasons, including a lack of adequate safety training and education, U.S. adolescents experience a higher rate of job-related injury compared to adult workers. Widely used social-psychological theories in public health research and practice, such as the theory of planned behavior, may provide guidance for developing and evaluating school-based interventions to prepare adolescents for workplace hazards and risks. Method: Using a structural equation modeling approach, the current study explores whether a modified theory of planned behavior model provides insight on 1,748 eighth graders’ occupational safety and health (OSH) attitude, subjective norm, self-efficacy and behavioral intention, before and after receiving instruction on a free, national young worker safety and health curriculum. Reliability estimates for the measures were produced and direct and indirect associations between knowledge and other model constructs assessed. Results: Overall, the findings align with the theory of planned behavior. The structural equation model adequately fit the data; most path coefficients are statistically significant and knowledge has indirect effects on behavioral intention. Confirmatory factor analyses suggest that the knowledge, attitude, self-efficacy, and behavioral intention measures each reflect a unique dimension (reliability estimates ≥0.86), while the subjective norm measure did not perform adequately. Conclusion: The findings presented provide support for using behavioral theory (specifically a modified theory of planned behavior) to investigate adolescents’ knowledge, perceptions, and behavioral intention to engage in safe and healthful activities at work, an understanding of which may contribute to reducing the downstream burden of injury on this vulnerable population—the future workforce. Practical application: Health behavior theories, commonly used in the social and behavioral sciences, have utility and provide guidance for developing and evaluating OSH interventions, including those aimed at preventing injuries and promoting the health and safety of adolescent workers in the U.S., who are injured at higher rates than are adults.     

System safety assessment using safety entropy

Safety assessment has a primary role in hazardous operations. Most studies on safety assessment focus on risk and accident modeling, in which safety is absent. These top-down methods are highly dependent on the occurred accidents to establish accidental scenarios, which may make the assessment approach lagging behind the evolving modern systems. Moreover, this “special to general” logic is scientifically suspect in safety assessment. There is a call for the development of safety assessment methods in the presence of system safety to complement risk-focused safety analysis. These methods should provide a framework based on a bottom-up approach to examine system safety from the operational perspective. This paper has attempted to provide a potential solution. In particular, a novel concept of safety entropy is proposed to integrate with The Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM), which is used to form the qualitative understanding of a system. A formula consisted of safety entropy, functional conformability, and system complexity has been established to determine the spontaneity of the safety state-changing process. The proposed method is applied to the safety assessment of a propane feed-control system. The results show the applicability of the method. Nevertheless, the model still needs to be further improved to fulfill better support for safety-related decision problems.     

Recent application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in process safety and loss prevention: A review

In recent years, significant progress has been made to ensure that process industries are among the safest workplaces in the world. However, with the increasing complexity of existing technologies and new problems brought about by emerging technologies, a strong need still exists to study the fundamentals of process safety and predict possible scenarios. This is attained by conducting the corresponding consequence modeling and risk assessments. As a result of the continuous advancement of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools and exponentially increased computation capabilities along with better understandings of the underlying physics, CFD simulations have been applied widely in the areas of process safety and loss prevention to gain new insights, improve existing models, and assess new hazardous scenarios. In this review, 126 papers from 2010 to 2020 have been included in order to systematically categorize and summarize recent applications of CFD for fires, explosions, dispersions of flammable and toxic materials from accidental releases, incident investigations and reconstructions, and other areas of process safety. The advantages of CFD modeling are discussed and the future of CFD applications in this research area is outlined.     

基于改进的SPAR-H化工实验室人因可靠性分析

近年来化工实验室事故屡禁不止,其中人的不安全行为是导致事故发生的主要原因.为评估实验人员可靠性,进一步管控化工实验室人的不安全行为,基于标准化工厂人因可靠性分析(SPAR-H)方法,结合化工实验室人因失误的特点,确定了更加适用于化工实验室的人因可靠性分析方法.首先依据"S-O-P"认知模型对人因失误类型进行划分;然后基...     

BIM技术在钢结构建筑抗震减灾管理中的应用

为提高钢结构建筑抗震减灾性能,降低建筑坍塌风险,研究BIM技术在钢结构建筑抗震减灾管理中的应用方法是非常必要的.利用BIM技术在钢结构建筑整体建造中的动态建模、可视化、信息共享管理以及抗震减灾性能检测等优势,在建筑抗震减灾管理决策阶段,选出最优方案,针对方案中影响建筑抗震减灾性能风险制定管理策略;在设计阶段,创建三维建...     

An Experimental Methodology for Monitoring Contaminant Transport Through Geotechnical Centrifuge Models

In this paper, an attempt has been made to highlight an experimental methodology for monitoring contaminant transport through locally available silty soil and commercially available clay in geotechnical centrifuge models, for different compaction states. Use of multiple depth sensors to determine depth distribution of sodium chloride in the soil column has been detailed. The obtained results have been compared with argentometric method. To validate the centrifuge modelling, modelling of models has been used. The test setup developed can simulate contaminant transport mechanisms through the soil mass, which is approximately 10 m deep, over a period of 600 days. R _e and P _e are found to be N times higher in the centrifuge models. These numbers are found to be several orders less than unity. This indicates that laminar flow prevails and the dominating Cl⁻ transport mechanism in centrifuge is diffusion. The study also highlights the fact that the geotechnical centrifuge modelling can be used as a viable alternative to field scale experimentation.     

A Simulation Study to Assess the Sensitivity of a Forest Health Monitoring Network to Outbreaks of Defoliating Insects

The sensitivity of the United States Forest Health Monitoring network to outbreaks of defoliating insects was examined by means of a simulation study. A model constructed specifically for the study was used to generate a wide variety of defoliation patterns in forested landscapes. Forest configuration was that of Minnesota, USA, as expressed by the GAP land cover classification. Combinations of model parameters were based on a Latin Hypercube sample. The relationship between the average number of plots defoliated and outbreak characteristics was then examined via multiple regression. Both theoretical and model results pointed to a strong, linear relationship between the average number of plots defoliated and outbreak size. Model results provided additional insight, suggesting a significant relationship between the average number of plots defoliated and other outbreak characteristics after outbreak size was taken into account.     

水溶性有机物对草萘胺在土壤中吸附与迁移的影响

采用批次吸附试验和土柱淋洗试验,研究了绿肥和污泥中水溶性有机物(DOM)对除草剂草萘胺在黄棕壤和石灰性潮土上吸附和迁移影响.结果表明,供试DOM均能明显降低草萘胺在2种土壤上的吸附,促进草萘胺的迁移,在黄棕壤上效果更明显.在所研究的草萘胺和DOM浓度范围内,绿肥DOM(GM)都比污泥DOM(SS)作用显著.草萘胺的吸附等温线可用Freundlich方程定量描述.绿肥DOM和污泥DOM可分别使黄棕壤中草萘胺吸附量比对照处理(不加DOM)减少22.9%和11.3%,使迁移出土体的草萘胺总量提高了73.42%和26.87%,而使潮土中草萘胺的吸附量减少了9.5%和6.5%,迁移出土体的草萘胺总量增加了43.54%和28.29%.因此,农业土壤中溶解性有机物对农药环境行为有一定影响.     

废旧电容器存放点多氯联苯的污染特征

采用气相色谱-电子捕获检测器测定废旧电容器存放地点附近的土壤和植物中多氯联苯(PCBs)的含量.分析了羊茅草(Festuca.L)的叶和根中PCBs的变化,应用多元线性回归方法定量判别了PCBs污染类型,进而探讨了PCBs的分布特征.结果表明,存放点PCBs污染水平较高,污染类型与Aroclor 1248相似.随着离污染点距离的增加,PCBs浓度急剧下降.污染类型逐步偏离Aroclor 1248,二氯和三氯联苯的百分比升高,四氯和五氯联苯下降.表现出水相和气相传输的作用,在一般情况下,水相传输起主导作用.另外,PCBs在羊茅草的叶和根中浓度的比值有上升的趋势.这种变化趋势和PCBs大气传输过程相关联,大气传输的贡献随着距离的增加PCBs浓度水平逐步下降而逐步显现.     

Anaerobic tapered fluidized bed reactor for starch wastewater treatment and modeling using multilayer perceptron neural network

Anaerobic treatability of synthetic sago wastewater was investigated in a laboratory anaerobic tapered fluidized bed reactor(ATFBR) with a mesoporous granular activated carbon(GAC)as a support material.The experimental protocol was defined to examine the effect of the maximum organic loading rate(OLR),hydraulic retention time(HRT),the efficiency of the reactor and to report on its steady- state performance.The reactor was subjected to a steady-state operation over a range of OLR up to 85.44 kg COD/(m~3.d).The COD removal efficiency was found to be 92% in the reactor while the biogas produced in the digester reached 25.38 m~3/(m~3·d) of the reactor. With the increase of OLR from 83.7 kg COD/(m~3.d),the COD removal efficiency decreased.Also an artificial neural network(ANN) model using multilayer perceptron(MLP)has been developed for a system of two input variable and five output dependent variables. For the training of the input-output data,the experimental values obtained have been used.The output parameters predicted have been found to be much closer to the corresponding experimental ones and the model was validated for 30% of the untrained data.The mean square error(MSE)was found to be only 0.0146.