According to the European Environment Agency (EEA 2018), air quality in Poland is one of the worst in Europe. There are several sources of air pollution, but the condition of the air in Poland is primarily the result of the so-called low-stack emissions from the household sector. The main reason for the emission of pollutants is the combustion of low-quality fuels (mainly low-quality coal) and waste, and the use of obsolete heating boilers with low efficiency and without appropriate filters. The aim of the study was to evaluate the impact of measures aimed at reducing low-stack emissions from the household sector (boiler replacement, change of fuel type, and thermal insulation of buildings), resulting from environmental regulations, on the improvement of energy efficiency and the emission of pollutants from the household sector in Poland. Stochastic energy and mass balance models for a hypothetical household, which were used to assess the impact of remedial actions on the energy efficiency and emission of pollutants, have been developed. The annual energy consumption and emissions of pollutants were estimated for hypothetical households before and after the implementation of a given remedial action. The calculations, using the Monte Carlo simulation, were carried out for several thousand hypothetical households, for which the values of the technical parameters (type of residential building, residential building area, unitary energy demand for heating, type of heat source) were randomly drawn from probability distributions developed on the basis of the analysis of the domestic structure of households. The model takes the coefficients of correlation between the explanatory variables in the model into account. The obtained results were multiplied so that the number of hypothetical households was equal to 14.1 million, i.e. the real number of households in Poland. The obtained results allowed for identifying the potential for reducing the emission of pollutants such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, dust, and nitrogen oxides, and improving the energy efficiency as a result of the proposed and implemented measures, aimed at reducing low-stack emission, resulting from the policy.
The potential for emissions of gaseous pollutants is 94% for CO, 49% for NOx, 90% for dust, and 87% for SO2. The potential for improving the energy efficiency in households is around 42%.
The discourse of advertising offers an environment conducive to the exploitation of novelty in language. Novelty can be conceptualised as an opposite of salience (Giora, 2003), being also a graded feature. Giora claims that there exists a specific level of novelty, which evokes pleasurable experience in recipients. She proposes Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, which may be implied in the investigation of various types of discourse marked with high originality. The paper reports on two studies. The initial one, described in Wojtaszek (2011), focused on the appreciation of three alternative versions of Polish and British advertising slogans, while the subsequent one is the attempt to find a relationship between the previous fi ndings and the degree of legibility of the investigated texts. In the appreciation task the plain formulations received the lowest scores, followed by the highly innovative slogans, with the optimally innovative formulations ranking highest. In the task where evaluation of clarity was performed, the plain formulations turned out to be the easiest, the optimally innovative slogans were a bit more diffi cult, and the highly innovative ones the least conspicuous. A number of interesting dependencies were also found, suggesting further developments for the future.
Production of near net shape thin strips using vertical twin roll casting method has been studied. In a typical VTRC process, the simultaneous action of solidification and rolling makes the process quite attractive as well as complicated. An industrially popular alloy A356 has been chosen for the VTRC processing. It is challenging to identify VTRC processing parameters for the alloy to produce thin strips because of its freezing range and complex composition. In the present work processing parameters of VTRC like roll speed, roll gap, melt superheat and the interface convective heat transfer coefficient have been investigated through modelling of the process. The mathematical model was developed which simultaneously solves the heat transfer, fluid flow and solidification, using commercial software COMSOL Multiphysics 5.4. VTRC sheets of alloy A356 were produced in an experimental set up and attempts were made to correlate the microstructures of VTRC A356 alloy to that predicted from the numerical studies to validate the model.
Net of temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen content measurements were made in situ at 24 stations in Admiralty Bay with the use of automatic analyzer Martek MK IV. Results proved a presence of two water masses located horizontally one over the other, with the boundary at depth of 15—35 m. The main, lower mass consists of homogenous waters inflowing from the Bransfield Strait. The upper, thin and much differentiated layer is formed through interaction of the main underlying water mass with meltwaters from glaciers and sea ice. It is probably formed along the whole archipelago and carried by surface currents into the bay where it is subjected to further modifications. Local salinity and temperature extremes are associated with glacier water runoff; local dissolved oxygen maxima seem to be connected with phytoplankton distribution. Strong currents occurring in te bay due to water circulation may cause local, short term and sometimes considerable fluctuations in values of parameters recorded at individual stations.
This paper describes the design and test of a new high-current electronic current transformer based on a Rogowski coil. For better performances, electronic current transformers are used to replace conventional electro-magnetic inductive current transformers based on ferromagnetic cores and windings to measure high-current on the high voltage distribution grids. The design of a new high-current electronic current transformer is described in this paper. The principal schemes of the prototype and partial evaluation results are presented. Through relative tests it is known that the prototype has a wide dynamic range and frequency band, and it can allow high accuracy measurements.
The lack of a comprehensive etymological dictionary of the best documented and, in many accounts, main Semitic language, i.e., Arabic, is a serious drawback for progress in our knowledge of the background and evolution of lexical studies of the whole Afrasian phylum. Any serious attempt at achieving that goal would require a team of a number of scholars working hard during several years; however, in the meantime, a modest shortcut could be to consecrate some personal efforts in that direction on a single important Arabic dialect, and this is what we are presently trying to bring about, within the project of a linguistic encyclopaedia of Andalusi Arabic. So far, our endeavours have cast some new lights of lexical borrowing not only from well-known cases of Aramean and Persian origins, but also, e.g., from Akkadian and Old Egyptian, as well as a rather detailed account of phonetic changes and lexical composition scarcely detected or never heretofore suspected and having often prevented the recognition of the true etyma of Semitic and non-Semitic stock, of which the present article is, of course, only a résumé and introduction.