The Garage of Complexity supports everyone who wants to take risks – the kind that can turn into something magnificent, push one’s academic career onto a new track, blaze a nonstandard trail.

Although access to knowledge and the freedom to conduct scientific research are now far greater than decades ago, the ideal is still a long way off.

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.

Chociaż dostęp do wiedzy i swoboda prowadzenia prac naukowych są obecnie znacznie większe niż kilkadziesiąt lat temu, do ideału ciągle nam daleko.

The article present results of economic efficiency evaluation of storage technology for electricity from coal power plants in large-scale chemical batteries. The benefits of using a chemical lithium-ion battery in a public power plant based on hard coal were determined on the basis of data for 2018 concerning the mining process. The analysis included the potential effects of using a 400 MWh battery to optimize the operation of 350 MW power units in a coal power plant. The research team estimated financial benefits resulting from the reduction of peak loads and the work of individual power units in the optimal load range. The calculations included benefits resulting from the reduction of fuel consumption (coal and heavy fuel oil – mazout) as well as from the reduction of expenses on CO2 emission allowances.

The evaluation of the economic efficiency was enabled by a model created to calculate the NPV and IRR ratios. The research also included a sensitivity analysis which took identified risk factors associated with changes in the calculation assumptions adopted in the analysis into account. The evaluation showed that the use of large-scale chemical batteries to optimize the operation of power units of the subject coal power plant is profitable. A conducted sensitivity analysis of the economic efficiency showed that the efficiency of the battery and the costs of its construction have the greatest impact on the economic efficiency of the technology of producing electricity in a coal power plant with the use of a chemical battery. Other variables affecting the result of economic efficiency are the factors related to battery durability and fuels: battery life cycle, prices of fuels, prices of CO2 emission allowances and decrease of the battery capacity during its lifetime.

A longstanding folk tradition among rural Russian peasants, ulichnye familii (‘street surnames’) were used by Doukhobors colloquially ‘on the street’ of a village to distinguish among families sharing the same official surname. Similar to Quebecois dit names and Scottish sept names, ulichnye familii arose because of the low surname stock within Doukhobor society. Passed down to succeeding generations and transferred between settlements, these names became a recognized form of address among Doukhobors, helping structure kinship networks and organize social interactions among villagers. When a large contingent of Doukhobors emigrated from the Caucasus to the Canadian prairies in 1899, they continued this naming practice in their settlements well into the early 20th century. A ubiquitous part of their culture for generations, today ulichnye familii have all but disappeared among Doukhobors, as a result of their assimilation, dispersal and modernization. This article offers an analysis of the Doukhobor anthroponymic custom of ulichnye familii: the social factors leading to their adoption; the etymological processes through which these names were formed; the manner in which they were used and transmitted; and the elements contributing to their eventual decline and disuse. It also includes an inventory of extant ulichnye familii among the Doukhobors of the Caucasus and Canada, obtained through extensive fi eld interviews and archival research.

The advancing degradation of the ecosystem and the occurring climate changes demand decisive action to be taken by citizens, aimed at levelling the results of the lack of balance between the natural environment and business operations. The growing importance of ecology is reflected on the international financial market in the form of green bonds. This article is devoted to green bonds which are a specific group of securities, namely ecological debt instruments. Despite the green debt being one of the most recent segments of the capital market, its very dynamic expansion can be observed year by year. The article is aimed at identifying the conditions for the development of the global environmental bonds market, specifically the factors stimulating and inhibiting the process. The article is a review in character and the following research methods were used in order to achieve the desired objective: analysis of subject literature and data analysis from the green bonds market, a case study, a descriptive and an inductive method.

Evaluating the image quality is a very important problem in image and video processing. Numerous methods have been proposed over the past years to automatically evaluate the quality of images in agreement with human quality judgments. The purpose of this work is to present subjective and objective quality assessment methods and their classification. Eleven widely used and recommended by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) subjective methods are compared and described. Thirteen objective method is briefly presented (including MSE, MD, PCC, EPSNR, SSIM, MS-SSIM, FSIM, MAD, VSNR, VQM, NQM, DM, and 3D-GSM). Furthermore the list of widely used subjective quality data set is provided.

The article reveals the problems of the formation and implementation of Ukraine’s energy policy

from the beginning of its independence to the present day. The specificities of the fuel and energy

sector of the country’s economy, the main stages of formation, macroeconomic conditions and the

problems of its transformation were analyzed. The slow and contradictory processes of reforming

Ukraine’s fuel and energy complex throughout the period of its independence and the fact that the

inconsistency with the main directions of the economic policy did not ensure its effective transformation

have been proven. The results of the OECD assessment of progress towards the main

objectives implementation of the Ukraine’s Energy Strategy have been presented. It was noted that

the results of the research suggest that the progress in achieving the goals of Ukraine’s Energy Strategy

is ambiguous, therefore the strategy needs to be refined accordingly. There are two main factors

moving away from the formal and declarative nature of Ukraine’s energy policy to its realistic model.

Firstly – an international factor associated with Ukraine’s extending involvement in international cooperation

within the energy sector, Ukraine’s international commitments to reform the energy sector

towards increasing energy efficiency, green energy, etc. Another – the crisis factor – as a result of the

energy policy of the Russian Federation. It was noted that the role of these factors in the future will

remain determining. The need to improve Ukraine’s energy policy, taking the current trends in the

development of the world energy system, new challenges and threats to politico-military and energy

confrontation with the Russian Federation into account, has been proven.

Nowadays, many known celebrities use social media as a channel to promote positive narratives and support humanitarian work. This article offers an analysis of the argumentative strategies employed in Instagram by a Spanish actor Javier Bardem, an Antarctic ambassador for Greenpeace, in order to attract the attention of the public to the ecological problems of the Antarctic Ocean. I have studied 76 posts published in Instagram during the 2018-2019 period. Starting from the theoretical framework of argumentation, as well as of pragmatic linguistics, I analyze those linguistic mechanisms and discursive strategies that are used with the aim to achieve the persuasive purposes.

In this study we look closely at the set of dorsal fricatives in Ukrainian with the purpose to explain their distributional peculiarities and phonological behavior. The analysis focuses on certain phonetic characteristics and the phonological represen-tation of the segments in question. Some other issues addressed in this study include the segmental strength which is calculated by the complexity of a segment and the presence of headed elements, the consonant-vowel interactions in which the segments in question participate and the impact of vowels on the distribution of back fricatives in Ukrainian. The main aim of this study is to propose and justify a particular phonological representation of the back fricatives in Ukrainian.

The following article deals with the language of emails. Of particular interest with regard to the linguistic features of emails is the fading distinction between the written medium and the oral conception. In order to receive a valid picture of the language of emails it is necessary to distinguish between formal and private emails (content wise). For this purpose, a corpus of selected emails has been compiled to illustrate language change in concrete examples of German emails. In this article examples of that email corpus have been selected to serve as underpinnings for the argumentations in this paper. Special attention is paid to the fading case marking on nouns, emoticons and syntax. With regard to syntax, the position of the lexical verb in subordinate clauses has been analyzed since in oral language it is often observed that even in a subordinate clause where verb-last is to be expected, we encounter verb-second. These are all indices of a more orally conceptualized language in medially written emails.

This paper presents a force-dynamics analysis of the meaning of English periphrastic causative verbs. It challenges the traditional categorization of causative semantics into direct and indirect causation and highlights the role of lexico-semantic elements such as (i) the balance of forces, (ii) the desirability of the causal effect, and (iii) the animacy of the causative entities in interaction. Combined together, these elements help define causative semantics and offer a new causative typology built on the categories of factitivity, manipulation and permission.

The focus of the paper is the recapitulation of the results originating from the research based on Old English deverbal nouns derived by means of overtly expressed suffixes. In the process of research thirteen suffi xes were classified and analysed: -d and its variants -ed, -oþ/-aþ, -þ, and -t, -el and its variants -l, -ol, and -ele, -els/-else, -en, -end, -ere, -estre, -et(t), -icge, -ing (F)/-ung, -ing (M, N), -ling, -nes(s). The research included a presentation of each suffix, a description of the derivational process along with additional processes as well as an analysis of nominal derivatives. The origin, spelling variants and other characteristic features were analysed for all thirteen suffixes. The study of the research corpus comprised examination of the derivational base, including its type and class as well as its transitivity and the derived lexeme, its membership within grammatical gender and declension as well as its structure and semantic features. The main purpose of the present article is to expound the final findings and comments on the subject concerning deverbal nouns in Old English.

This paper first looks into mechanisms that license the formation of transitive causative constructions with the motion verbs run and walk. As a further step, it takes into consideration intransitive constructions with these verbs and, in doing so, it contrasts the meaning of run with walk as its most natural counterpart. The paper provides evidence in favour of positing one of the verb’s senses as core, representing a kind of starting point against which some of the other motion senses are established. In this way, arguments are offered in favour of the lexical network model of polysemy. At the same time, it is shown that the extensive usability of run (and, by the same token, the restricted usability of walk) is closely related to the degree of the verb’s context-sensitivity, which, in its turn, points to the conception of the verb’s meaning as representing a dynamic potential.

In this study, X-ray diffraction, thermogravimetric analysis and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) method were used to analyze the main characteristics of sweet potato starch, and to analyze the thermal degradation process of sweet potato starch. Specifically, X-ray diffraction to study its structure, thermogravimetric analysis to study the thermal degradation kinetics, and differential scanning calorimetry to study the thermogram of sweet potato starch. The thermal decomposition kinetics of sweet potato starch was examined within different heating rates in nitrogen atmosphere. Different models of kinetic analysis were used to calculate the activation energies using thermogravimetric data of the thermal degradation process. Activation energies obtained from Kissinger, Flynn-Wall- Ozawa, and Šatava-Šesták models were 173.85, 174.87 and 174.34 kJ/mol, respectively. The values of activation energy indicated that the thermal degradation of the sweet potato starch was a single reaction mechanism or the combination of multi-reaction mechanisms. The differential scanning calorimetry analysis show that two decomposition stages were presented: the first at a low temperature involves the decomposition of long chain; and the second at a high temperature represents the scission of glucose ring. This information was helpful to design the processing process of many natural polymers. Thermogravimetric Fourier transform-infrared (TG–FTIR) analysis showed that the main pyrolysis products included water, methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and others.