The Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences (Bull.Pol. Ac.: Tech.) is published bimonthly by the Division IV Engineering Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, since the beginning of the existence of the PAS in 1952. The journal is peer‐reviewed and is published both in printed and electronic form. It is established for the publication of original high quality papers from multidisciplinary Engineering sciences with the following topics preferred: Artificial and Computational Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, Civil Engineering, Control, Informatics and Robotics, Electronics, Telecommunication and Optoelectronics, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Thermodynamics, Material Science and Nanotechnology, Power Systems and Power Electronics.

Journal Metrics: JCR Impact Factor 2018: 1.361, 5 Year Impact Factor: 1.323, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 2017: 0.319, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2017: 1.005, CiteScore 2017: 1.27, The Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education 2017: 25 points.

Abbreviations/Acronym: Journal citation: Bull. Pol. Ac.: Tech., ISO: Bull. Pol. Acad. Sci.-Tech. Sci., JCR Abbrev: B POL ACAD SCI-TECH Acronym in the Editorial System: BPASTS.

The paper presents the results of the mechanical, electrical, CCSEM and XRD measurements of hard coal, conducted in simulated conditions of sintering in atmospheres of O2/CO2,. The changes of the coal ash resistivity are correlated with the content of the oxides and with the sintering temperature determined by the mechanical test and Leitz method. The SEM-EDS analysis was conducted for deposits on the probe. The changes of the measured ash samples, observed during sintering process in O2/CO2 atmosphere, were discussed in the ash microstructure point of view.

Weak value amplification is a measurement technique where small quantum mechanical interactions are amplified and manifested macroscopically in the output of a measurement apparatus. It is shown here that the linear nature of weak value amplification provides a straightforward comparative methodology for using the value of a known small interaction to estimate the value of an unknown small interaction. The methodology is illustrated by applying it to quantify the unknown size of an optical Goos-Hänchen shift of a laser beam induced at a glass/gold interface using the known size of the shift at a glass/air interface.