The purpose of this study is to investigate a structure’s response to blast loading when composite columns are used instead of conventional reinforced concrete (RC) cross sections and when a conventional structure is retrofitted with braces. The study includes conducting dynamic analyses on three different structures: a conventional reference RC structure, a modified structure utilizing composite columns, and a modified structure retrofitted with steel braces. The two modified structures were designed in order to investigate their performance when subjected to blast loading compared to the conventional design. During the dynamic analyses, the structures were exposed to simulated blast loads of multiple intensities using the finite-element modelling software, SeismoStruct. To evaluate their performance, the responses of the modified structures were analyzed and compared with the response of the conventional structure. It was concluded that both the structure with composite columns and the steel brace structure experienced less damage than the conventional model. The best performance was obtained through the steel brace structure.
The article presents probable consequences for the protection of deposits and other mining needs, related to the entry into force of the Act of July 5, 2018 on the Facilitation of the Preparation and Implementation of Housing Investments and Accompanying Investments. This act introduces facilities for the preparation and implementation of housing as well as related projects, including the possibility of introducing investments incompatible with the existing local plans. In addition, it does so in a situation where land reserves for housing development, both in local plans and in studies of conditions and directions of spatial development, many times exceed the future needs of our country.
The article presents the fundamental changes introduced by the Act to the existing planning and spatial planning system, as well as the risks associated with the mining industry. Among the latter, the following can be mentioned: lower stability of local law regulations, the possibility of resolving changes in spatial development at a very fast pace, without providing an effective way to inform subjects that may be threatened by these changes and increase the probability of the appearance of investments in the area of mining, the neighborhood of which may lead to limit or even liquidate these installations, due to even their disadvantages to housing. Some remedies have been proposed to mitigate some of the threats in the article.
The Act in question was prepared and passed at an express pace, with a large opposition from many environments. At the same time, a number of legal solutions were applied in it, which were not applied in the Polish law. As a result, there are many doubts about the effects of its introduction.
In Western music culture instruments have been developed according to unique instrument acoustical features based on types of excitation, resonance, and radiation. These include the woodwind, brass, bowed and plucked string, and percussion families of instruments. On the other hand, instrument performance depends on musical training, and music listening depends on perception of instrument output. Since musical signals are easier to understand in the frequency domain than the time domain, much effort has been made to perform spectral analysis and extract salient parameters, such as spectral centroids, in order to create simplified synthesis models for musical instrument sound synthesis. Moreover, perceptual tests have been made to determine the relative importance of various parameters, such as spectral centroid variation, spectral incoherence, and spectral irregularity. It turns out that the importance of particular parameters depends on both their strengths within musical sounds as well as the robustness of their effect on perception. Methods that the author and his colleagues have used to explore timbre perception are: 1) discrimination of parameter reduction or elimination; 2) dissimilarity judgments together with multidimensional scaling; 3) informal listening to sound morphing examples. This paper discusses ramifications of this work for sound synthesis and timbre transposition.
Protection of the environment and counteracting global warming require finding alternative sources of energy. One of the methods of generating energy from environmentally friendly sources is increasing the share of gaseous fuels in the total energy balance. The use of these fuels in compression-ignition (CI) engines is difficult due to their relatively high autoignition temperature. One solution for using these fuels in CI engines is operating in a dualfuel mode, where the air and gas mixture is ignited with a liquid fuel dose. In this method, a series of relatively complex chemical processes occur in the engine's combustion chamber, related to the combustion of individual fuel fractions that interact with one another. Analysis of combustion of specific fuels in this type of fuel injection to the engine is difficult due to the fact that combustion of both fuel fractions takes place simultaneously. Simulation experiments can be used to analyse the impact of diesel fuel combustion on gaseous fuel combustion. In this paper, we discuss the results of simulation tests of combustion, based on the proprietary multiphase model of a dual-fuel engine. The results obtained from the simulation allow for analysis of the combustion process of individual fuels separately, which expands the knowledge obtained from experimental tests on the engine.
In the paper a new implementation of a compact smart resistive sensor based on a microcontroller with internal ADCs is proposed and analysed. The solution is based only on a (already existing in the system) microcontroller and a simple sensor interface circuit working as a voltage divider consisting of a reference resistor and a resistive sensor connected in parallel with an interference suppression capacitor. The measurement method is based on stimulation of the sensor interface circuit by a single square voltage pulse and on sampling the resulting voltage on the resistive sensor. The proposed solution is illustrated by a complete application of the compact smart resistive sensor used for temperature measurements, based on an 8-bit ATxmega32A4 microcontroller with a 12-bit ADC and a Pt100 resistive sensor. The results of experimental research confirm that the compact smart resistive sensor has 1°C resolution of temperature measurement for the whole range of changes of measured temperatures.