The article contains considerations on possible actions directed at increasing productivity of hard

coal mining industry. It is necessary to improve the state of the industry, and ensure its survival. Basic

definitions and measures concerning productivity and management were presented to illustrate examples

referring to a mining enterprise. Then, basing on organizing, one of the management functions, the issue

of productivity in a mining enterprise and its influence on improving effectiveness of operational management,

was analysed. An assumption was presented that solutions concerning identification of sources

and volume of costs, hitherto existing in mining enterprises, ought to be complemented with the planning

function following process approach. It can be the starting point for decisions of economic feasibility of

given deposits, seams or parts of them, before mining operations start, and to control incurred costs in

process approach. The article is summed up with a process algorithm of cost management.

Predicted climate change may have negative impact on many environmental components including vegetation by increase of evapotranspiration and reduction of available water resources. Moreover, a growing global population and extensive use of water for irrigation and industry result in increasing demand for water. Facing these threats, quantitative and qualitative protection of water resources requires development of tools for drought assessment and prediction to support effective decision making and mitigate the impacts of droughts. Therefore, the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management, National Research Institute has developed and implemented a set of tools for the operational drought hazard assessment. The developed tools cover drought indices estimation, assessment of sensitivity to it formation and drought hazard prediction. They are streamlined into an operational scheme combined with data assimilation routines and products generation procedures.

A drought hazard assessment scheme was designed to be implemented into the platform of a hydrological system supporting the operational work of hydrological forecast offices. The scheme was launched to run operationally for the selected catchments of the Odra River and the Wisla River basins. The crucial resulting products are presented on the website operated by IMWM-NRI: POSUCH@ (Operational System for Providing Drought Prediction and Characteristics) (http://posucha.imgw.pl/). The paper presents the scheme and preliminary results obtained for the drought event which began in August 2011.

Substitution of fossil fuels with alternative energy carriers has become necessary due to climate change and fossil fuel shortages. Fermentation as a way of producing biohydrogen, an attractive and environmentally friendly future energy carrier, has captured received increasing attention in recent years because of its high H2 production rate and a variety of readily available waste substrates used in the process. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of fermentative biohydrogen production, factors affecting this process, as well as various bioreactor configurations and performance parameters, including H2 yield and H2 production rate.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) typically generate income from two main sources; student

fees and research income. In contrast, the predominant waste streams in HEIs tend

to include; (1) assignment/examination mark submission process, (2) photocopying process

and (3) the funding application process. Unintended internal process complexities and barriers

typically aggravate the challenges already inherent in the research grant application

process. Although Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has been adopted by a number of HEIs in Ireland,

very few have adopted an integrated LSS approach for waste reduction in the research grant

application process. To identify barriers and waste in the research grant application process

within an Irish HEI in an EU environment, the authors used an online survey deployed to

240 academics and researchers. The survey response rate was 13%. The participating HEI

in this pilot study generated an annual income (including student fees and research income)

exceeding e240 million for the academic year 2017/2018. Using an LSS lens, this paper identified

the primary waste in the research grant application process from an academic and

researcher perspective to be; editing and revising applications, liaising and communicating

with collaborators and waiting for information. Organised thematically, the main barriers

were strategic thinking, collaborator identification and co-ordination, eligibility, process,

time and support & mentoring. The results from this study can be used to inform the next

stage of the research where empirical studies will be carried out in other HEIs to develop a

practical roadmap for the implementation of LSS as an operational excellence improvement

methodology in the research grant application process.

The objectives of this study were to develop a framework of the collaboration network, operational

performance, and reverse logistics determinants on the performance outcomes of the

auto parts industry, and to study the direct, indirect, and overall effects of the factors that

influence the performance outcomes of the auto parts industry. This quantitative research

utilized a questionnaire as the tool for data collection, which was completed by the managers

in the auto parts industry from 320 companies. According to the analysis with the Structural

Equation Modeling (SEM), it was found that the collaboration networks, operational

performance, and reverse logistics positively affect the performance outcomes; whereas, the

collaboration networks mainly affect the development of organizations by causing performance

outcomes to continue growing unceasingly, including the enhancement of sustainable

competitive capacity and the operational results of the auto parts industry.

The operational mineral deposit reconnaissance tends to evaluate its parameters to conduct safe and profitable production. Particular deposit parameters, important from the point of mineral deposit management, are estimated on the basis of observations carried out by mining geological surveys. These observations usually involve sampling, drilling, laboratory analyses and others. The use of fuzzy description to assess the parameters of the mineral deposit was proposed in the paper. In the fuzzy characteristics, an imprecise descriptive description appeared in place of a particular numerical quantity. This approach was used to description of the ore deposit features (metal content, volume, and metal yield) by assigning them specific characteristic functions, whose distributions were based on basic statistical quantities. Characteristic functions can be used to prepare operational strategies for any configuration of required deposit parameters resulting from the production management needs. For this purpose, selected logical operators of fuzzy sets were used. In the next approach to fuzzy modeling, an opportunity to characterize the deposit in a subjective approach was indicated, where the assessment of the deposit parameters is based on rough, in some way, discretionary observation and evaluation. Such model construction enabled the overall assessment of the deposit from the point of view of any parameters. Through the implementation of appropriate inference rules, adequate fuzzy control planes were obtained, which may also be useful in the context of operational mine strategy planning.

The fact that mines have to be established at the place where they are located without having a chance to choose a location brings out area usage conflicts with areas that need to be protected. In fact, forestlands are most common in these overlapping areas in Turkey. In order to perform mining activities in this overlapping forestlands, mining enterprises in Turkey receive forest land permit fees (FLPF), reforestation fees, rehabilitation fees + security deposit of conformity to the environment (SDCE), and other fees. In order to determine the share of these costs in mining investments and operating costs (OC) and to bring a solution proposal so that these costs do not pose a risk of loss of the investment in the mining enterprises, questions have been asked to mining enterprises within Turkey using the “Survey Monkey” program. The averages of all forest fees determined from the answers are proportioned to the mining investment amounts (MIA) and the annual average OC of each mining company responding to the Survey.

Thus, the distribution criteria of different forest fees that are required to be paid by the mining enterprises in order to carry out mining operations in the forestlands in Turkey and their distribution on the basis of mineral groups were analyzed. In this calculation, it was suggested that all the fees in Turkey should be reduced to a more reasonable degree by suggesting solutions regarding the calculation method envisaged by the FLPF, which has a very high share. Otherwise, the result of these rates shows that the costs of forest land-use for mining stipulated by the legislation in Turkey are quite high compared to other countries, and that the current mining investments can have difficulty in maintaining their economic operability in the presence of these required costs.

In this paper, a new set of intuitionistic fuzzy aggregation operators have been introduced under the environment of intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs). For this, firstly focused on some existing aggregation operators and then new operational rules known as Dombi operation have been pro- posed which make the advancement of flexibility behavior with the parameter. Based on Dombi operation laws, some new averaging and geometric aggregation operators namely, intuitionistic fuzzy Dombi weighted averaging, ordered weighted averaging and hybrid weighted averaging operator, classified as IFDWA, IFDOWA and IFDHWA operators respectively and intuitionistic fuzzy Dombi geometric, ordered weighted geometric and hybrid weighted geometric operators, labeled as IFDWG, IFDOWG and IFDHWG operators respectively have been proposed. Further, some properties such as idempotency, boundedness, monotonicity and commutative are investigated. Finally, a multi-attribute decision-making model has been developed for the proposed operators to select the best mutual fund for investment. The execution of the comparative study has been examined with the existing operators in this environment.

The increase of ship’s energy utilization efficiency and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions have been high lightened in recent years and have become an increasingly important subject for ship designers and owners. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is seeking measures to reduce the CO2emissions from ships, and their proposed energy efficiency design index (EEDI) and energy efficiency operational indicator (EEOI) aim at ensuring that future vessels will be more efficient. Waste heat recovery can be employed not only to improve energy utilization efficiency but also to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, a typical conceptual large container ship employing a low speed marine diesel engine as the main propulsion machinery is introduced and three possible types of waste heat recovery systems are designed. To calculate the EEDI and EEOI of the given large container ship, two software packages are developed. From the viewpoint of operation and maintenance, lowering the ship speed and improving container load rate can greatly reduce EEOI and further reduce total fuel consumption. Although the large container ship itself can reach the IMO requirements of EEDI at the first stage with a reduction factor 10% under the reference line value, the proposed waste heat recovery systems can improve the ship EEDI reduction factor to 20% under the reference line value.

Conceptions of analogue electronics circuit based on a multiple-input floating gate field-effect transistor MOS (MIFGMOS) have

been presented. The simple add and differential voltage amplifiers with one and two MIFGMOS transistors and multiple-input operational amplifiers with their application have been proposed. One of them was used for the realisation of a controlled floating resistor. Results of circuit simulations in SPICE programme using the simple substitute macromodel of MIFGMOS transistor have been shown.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system requires consideration and ensuring efficient operating conditions for the most loaded parts in the product, not only at the product's design stage, but also at the production stage. Operational properties of the product can be significantly improved if we take into consideration the formation of the functional surfaces wear resistance parameters already at the planning stage of the technological process structure and parameters of the product's machining. The method of constructing predictive models of the influence of the technological process structure on the formation of a complex of product's operational properties is described in the article. The relative index of operational wear resistance of the machined surface, which is characterized by the use of different variants of the structure and parameters of this surface treatment, depends on the microtopographic state of the surface layer and the presence of cutting-induced residual stress. On the example of the eject pin machining it has been shown how the change in the structure of the manufacturing process from grinding to the turning by tool with the tungsten carbide insert affects the predicted wear resistance of the machined functional surface.

Ship management is a topic that has rarely been approached in the modern Polish maritime legal sciences. There are numerous reasons behind the present state of affairs but it seems that the foremost one is, that the focus in political, legal and economic discourse is still on the legal aspects of ship ownership. This trend continues despite the fact that today over 73% of world shipping tonnage is managed by the specialized ship management entities. An economic analysis has proven that year after year Poland was ceasing to be a large ship owning nation, it used to be, and that this trend is unlikely to be reversed in the short and mid-term perspective. Poland may, however, still continue to play a vital role in the world of shipping by becoming a ship management centre. This article aims to introduce the Readers to the selected aspects of ship management operations.

The paper characterizes the status, trends and perspectives of irrigation in Poland after the reforms in agriculture and technology. Irrigation in Poland has supplemental character. It is used in short periods during the growing season and plays an important role in mitigating the effects of drought on crop production. Sub-irrigation from ditches is applied on permanent grasslands, sprin-kling – in field cultivation of arable crops, sprinkling and drip irrigation – in vegetable growing in open areas, micro-jets and drip irrigation systems – in orchards. Drip irrigation and micro-jets sys-tems are also applied in plant cultivation in greenhouses.

Under the economic conditions of Polish agriculture irrigation is often an unprofitable measure. The existing irrigation systems and facilities are only used to a small extent. After changes in the forms of ownership in agriculture, the large-area sprinkling systems were degraded. Small irrigation systems, mainly drip irrigation and micro-sprinkler irrigation, have recently become more common in private farms. Sub-irrigation systems are largely degraded and used only to a small extent if at all. In order to use these systems more effectively, it is necessary to reconstruct and modernize them. In many cases the factor preventing the use of irrigation systems is the deficit of water of required qual-ity and its availability. Besides unfavourable economic conditions, it is one of the main limitations in the development of irrigation in Poland.

Operational Transresistance Amplifier (OTRA) has been a topic of great interest recently. OTRA has proved itself to be an appropriate device for the analog applications. As MOS scaling suffers from various problems, carbon nanotube field effect transistor (CNTFET) has came into light as one of the brightest alternative for FET (Field Effect Transistors) based devices. This work has introduced a new CNTFET based OTRA which is capable of realising inverse low pass filter using two OTRAs and few passive elements. CNTFET based OTRA has been designed and simulated at 10nm technology node. The working ability of the designed model has been conformed using HSPICE simulation. It is compared with conventional CMOS based OTRA. The comparative analysis has revealed improvement in various performance parameters. The paper also presents how change in number of carbon nanotube in CNTFETs in OTRA circuit affects the transresistance gain and input impedance. The optimized results are also discussed to improve transresistance gain and input impedance. The paper also dealt with the realisation of inverse low pass filter using proposed CNTFET based OTRA.

Commonly known DC-AC switching converters are commonly used in compensator branches. One example of this is a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM). It consists of a voltage source converter (VSC) and acts as an inverter with a capacitor as a DC power source. These compensators use the PWM switching scheme or space vector modulation (SVM) method. Both methods require the desired signal to be generated. In some cases, as during the synthesis of self-excited systems or active energy-compensators, it is necessary to perform the desired branch immittance, e.g. negative capacitance, inductance, resistance or irrational impedance. In such cases, it is necessary to control the universal branch on the basis of a formula. This article presents the implementation method for the convolutional type impedance operators.

The paper raises the issue of optimizing the control of the rural low voltage microgrids. Microgrids can operate in a synchronous mode with grids of distribution system operators and in an island mode. We can distinguish two control strategies in microgrids: one approach based on centralized control logic, which is usually used, and another on decentralized control logic. In this paper we decided to present the approach based on the distributed control, combining the efforts of the distributed cooperative control and modified Monte Carlo optimization method. Special attention has been paid to the impact of the order of processing particular devices’ groups on results of optimization calculations. Moreover, different scenarios of behavior of the microgrid control system with respect to the communication loss have been also presented. The influence of the issue of continuity of communication between particular devices’ groups on the possibility of carrying out the optimization process has been investigated. Additionally, characteristics of power loads and generation of electricity from small renewable energy sources appearing in rural areas have been described and the sensitivity of the optimization algorithm to the changes of demanded power values and changes of values of power generated by renewable energy sources has been studied. We analyzed different objective functions which can be used as an optimization goal both in synchronous and island operation modes of microgrid. We decided to intensively test our approach on a sample rural LV microgrid, which is typical in the countryside. The observed results of the tests have been presented and analyzed in detail. Generally, results achieved with the use of proposed distributed control are the same as with the use of centralized control. We think that the approach based on distributed control is promising for practical applications, because of its advantages.

Faith and culture remain closely connected. Faith that does not become a culture is not the belief of the original. Nevertheless, we can observe two behavioral and confrontational and cooperative models over the history of these two relationships. Confrontation is a kind of cultural opposition to faith. Cooperation is aimed at comprehensive cooperation. The article analyzes the history of these relations which together with the new person’s awareness of the Church was able to develop a new concept of culture through which the Church will not only try to remove accommodation but also try to root in the world. Doing that, Church doesn’t forget about the evangelizing nature of the culture and communicative character of faith. Faith in Christ can be a source of culture with a C hristian profile, however, the point of departure for culture will always be human and not faith. The task of Culture is to express who a person is. Emphasizing this anthropology that portrays a man as a cultural centre goes hand in hand with presenting the human person as a picture of God. The above statement is the summit of personalistic anthropology and the source of the greatest human dignity. In this way, anthropology and Christology are as close as possible to each other.