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This paper presents the results of a study of the hydrolysis of microcrystalline cellulose in a subcritical water medium. The influence of temperature, time, cellulose/water ratio, cellulose particle size, and other parameters on the hydrolysis process was studied. The influence on the process of pretreatment of aqueous dispersions of cellulose with ultrasound was studied. It was shown that the optimal processing time is 30 min (~ 150 kJ). Over a given period of time, destruction and partial hydrolysis of the amor...

The article presents the results of georadar-sensing (GRL-sounding) of the therapeutic mud manifestation site of Arasan-Kunduzdy litter located in the Panfilov district of Almaty region on the right bank of the former riverbed of Ili (oxbow), 45 km south-west of the city of Zharkent, in order to determine the power mud deposits and the study of its lithological structure. GRL- sounding was done using GPR OKO-2 AB-400 antenna unit. It was made 4 profiles on the north bank of litter (profile 1 - 150 m, profile 2 - 1...

The aim of the paper is to propose guidelines for a general virtual reality based framework for training people how to behave and evacuate in business buildings during disastrous events. Disaster is a chain of dangerous events or exposure to hazardous conditions, which could lead to harmful damages to people with an eventual loss of life or property. Such risk conditions can be managed by planning well ahead before disasters occur and by performing suitable training to avoid critical disaster consequences. The pap...

Spontaneous combustion is a phenomenon that results from the heating of combustible organic powders by slow oxidation and which occurs through the air passage (created by an air depression) through the mass of dust. The oxidation phenomenon of combustible powders represents their reaction with atmospheric oxygen resulting in products of carbon dioxide, carbon oxide, water and other gases whose content depends on the temperature at which the oxidation takes place. During oxidation, the oxidation rate is a function ...

The dynamics of oil production growth observed in the world is conditioned by intensification of oil resource development related to hard-to-recover fields, particularly, shale oil recovery that has allowed for the USA to become a leader in the world production. The common petroleum and gas production technique is hydraulic fracture treatment, which has become an issue of public concern as to its environmental safety. There is an ambivalent attitude towards this technology in the world. In some countries it is for...

The main goal of this work was to determine the effect of fertilization with N and P on three varieties of clover (Trifolium incarnatum L., Medicago lupulina L., Trifolium repens L.), their biomass production and soil quality under the cultivated crop. Soil conditions were monitored using the following indicators: content of plant available nutrients (P, Ca, Mg), Ctot and Ntot. The measured values will be used as a basis for the technology of growing clover and maize in mixed cropping. Our greenhouse pot experimen...

The work is devoted to historical retrospective on the main aspects of the modern concept of development of the world economic system. The relevance of research is due to the presence of environmental problems in the modern economy. The data on the impact of the concept of world development on environmental development are presented. The genesis of the development of the main scientific publications on the chosen research topic is presented. The role of such a non-governmental organization as the Club of Rome, whi...

The aim of this article is to create a risk analysis of selected school facilities which can be an auxiliary tool of security solutions against terrorism. Most terrorist attacks are focused on so-called soft targets - crowded places, which are not secure against violent attacks. Furthermore, attacks on school facilities abroad are frequent too. A wellprepared risk analysis is a necessary method to detect weaknesses and strengths of the security of a soft target. The university in Zlin in the Czech Republic was cho...

Hospitals are an essential element of public infrastructure. Some aspects of civil infrastructure have become considered critical. Critical infrastructure means an element of critical infrastructure or a system of critical infrastructure (healthcare system), the disruption of the function of which would have a severe impact on state security, provision of basic living needs of the population, and the health of persons or state economy. To the critical infrastructure sector belongs transport, energy, agriculture, h...

The paper deals with the quantitative risk assessment approach to the use of the universal quantitative method RM/RA CRAMM. The method is applied to criminality cases related to arson and other cases of environmental insensitivity influenced by social background. The arson statistics recorded in Slovakia are usually hidden behind other reasons of the fire cause. The hypothesis is that there is a certain impact of the social environment on criminality, including arson behaviour. The quantitative method needs quanti...

A characteristic feature of streams in the East Slovakian lowland is their considerable fluctuation. On the one hand, this causes dry periods in streams, on the other hand, with periods extremely rich in precipitation - flood periods. One of the most important streams in this area is the Ondava River. One of the essential elements in the protection of the area against floods are hydrotechnical structures along the streams ? flood control levees. In terms of construction and also with their parameters, they belong ...

Flammable liquids in motion when is transporting by pipes, is mixing, pumping, filtering, agitating or by pouring them from one vessel to another can generate static charges even if the respective pipes or vessels are bonded and earthed. Also, loads may occur if the liquid is splashes and forms a mist inside the vessel (tank, container). Accumulation of static electricity can, under certain conditions, be discharge and ignite the explosive atmosphere. In the paper are presented some aspects regarding the technical...

The current building sector is undergoing major changes due to increased pressure to reduce energy consumption in buildings and increase the share of renewable energy sources. Modern systems and technologies can save energy, but also affect the quality of the indoor environment. In terms of air quality, attention was paid to the exterior, such as emission limits, etc. The indoor environment is generally a physical reality that surrounds the living organism with which it interacts, and which constantly contributes ...

The studies were performed using risk management tools during the operation of combined types of transport in open pit mining [1-5]. The goal is timely and efficient risks management during the rock mass transportation. The risks in study were identified while using combined types of transport at the open pit mining facilities [6]. Qualitative and quantitative risk analyses were carried out for their further effective management and monitoring. Information on the identification, classification, qualitative and qua...

The management of protected territories in Bulgaria is a subject to the Bulgarian and European environmental legislation. The used plans for management provide basic information on the condition of abiotic and biotic components of the natural environment in the protected territories and Guidelines for their management, control and conservation. The water resources with their specificity and dynamics of alteration are a major abiotic component that impacts on functioning, development and conservation of ecosystems ...

In order for Latvia to achieve the long-term strategic goal set in its policy documents ? to become the greenest country in the world ? it is essential to promote social entrepreneurship, as the social enterprises perform economic activities having positive social effects in relation to the protection and preservation of the environment. In 2019 in Latvia, 5% of the social enterprises were engaged in the field of environmental protection; therefore, the research aims to examine the role of social entrepreneurship ...

Drinking water is one of the critical resources, but still not accessible to everyone. In case of a crisis event, this state can even worsen depending on the manner of the crisis event. Therefore, it is important to protect drinking water resources and monitor activities that can threaten the safety of drinking water e. g. industrial, agricultural activities, building of technical infrastructure or insufficient management of water facilities etc. Although there has not been in-depth research, there is evidence of ...

The paper presents well-preserved microfaunas (foraminifers and ostracods) enclosed in cuttings samples and cores recovered by 6 hydrocarbon wells drilled in the Moesian Platform, in Silistea area, S Romania. The lithological and micropaleontological obtained data improve the stratigraphic knowledge at regional level. The analyzed samples contain foraminifera that characterize biozones extending in the Sarmatian, as follows: the middle Volhynian Varidentella reussi, the late Volhynian Elphidium reginum, the early ...

The research investigates the possibilities of using cloud technologies to supply the life cycle of satellite remote sensing of seas and oceans by using the examples of implementing a number of research projects. The need to control the condition of seas and oceans necessitates the timely receipt and complex processing of large amounts of satellite remote sensing data. Currently, these processes can be performed using cloud technologies. One case of implementing such technologies is the Google Earth Engine (GEE) c...

The work dwells on finding solutions to a task related to substantiating locations where instrumental measurements should be performed within a program for monitoring over exposure to electromagnetic radiation (EMR) in radio-frequency range in a large industrial city with its area exceeding 800 km2 and population being more than 1 million. A database has been created (and bound to a vector map of the city) containing data on 2 011 sources of EMR in radio-frequency range. They were 1 666 basic mobile communication ...

The antibiotic resistance is one of biosphere scale problem created by not only the medicine, but veterinary, food industry and animal husbandry. Bacteriocins are defined as ribosomally synthesized peptides with narrow or in some cases broad antimicrobial activity producing by various bacteria, especially against closely-related species. Among bacteriocin producers food-grade lactic acid bacteria (LAB) provide an increase interest due to their safety, preservative ability and potential probiotic properties. Unlike...

Europa has the densest, diversified and completely transport system on the entire world. Maritime transports have developed since ancient times (in the Mediterranean basin and the countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean) and they are still in development because they present a key point in freight transport. Europe controls one third of the world's commercial fleet and is one of the world's leading maritime centres with 329 key ports along the coast, including Rotterdam, which is the second largest port in the worl...

The investigation of the ambient seismic noise recorded by the Bulgarian Antarctic seismic station LIVV over four polar summers from 2015 to 2020 is presented in the paper. The method for evaluating the Power Spectral Density and Probability Density Functions is applied to study the distribution of the seismic noise in a period interval from 0.02 s to 30 s. The method is widely applied in seismological practice of the Seismological Society for carrying out both fundamental and practical scientific projects. For a ...

The coastal retreat in touristic areas concerns many sectors along the Romanian Black Sea shore; it usually requires programmes for beach nourishment, and consequently, large amounts of proper sand are necessary to be available for such activities. In order to minimize the effort for searching offshore sand, we conducted seismo-acoustics researches and some other archived data have been used during these researches, both for planning the sea works and during the integrated interpretation of the data. The results o...

A high-quality environment is becoming absolutely necessary not only for the health of the population, but also for the good functioning of the economy and the availability of natural resources. The aim of environmental policy and instruments of environmental policy is to ensure the required quality of the environment. Environmental aspects have become an essential part of the decision-making processes of developed European countries. Environmental management has not been implemented separately from other economic...

The paper deals with the pressing issue of energy saving in the production activities of forest companies. We see the solution to this problem in involving renewable energy sources to production. However, in most cases, the drying and thermochemical processing technologies used at enterprises are not able to meet modern requirements for energy consumption, environmental friendliness, and efficiency. To supply heat and electric energy to vegetable biofeedstock drying equipment, a self-contained complex energy-savin...

The paper presents our findings during the adoption of e-learning in the National Geoinformation Center of Bulgaria (NGIC). It details the approach used to build a set of functionalities that produce and deliver online educational products to the customers of NGIC. The Center is a consortium of the national providers of Earth observation data with a purpose to design and co-develop integrated information products. NGIC's information system is being developed since 2019. It is built adopting the IT service manageme...

With the current worldwide trend of increasing individual car traffic in the urban road network, sustainable transport has become one of the key issues for the sustainable future of transport in cities. In fact, most of the journeys in the urban area are on shorter distances where we can substitute the car very easily. The contribution deals with the current state, after two months from the first appearance of shared e-scooters in the capital of Slovakia - Bratislava. We analysed the shared e-scooters from a mobil...

Sustainability is a criterion defined since the 1980s, essential in all areas of activity, without which development cannot be acheived. Thermal insulation mattresses produced using sheep wool, successfully meet the conditions imposed by this criterion. This type of building material ensures the responsible use of non-renewable natural resources, the possibility of reuse and recycling of materials, contributes to environmental protection and pollution reduction, energy saving and provides a hygienic and healthy li...

Development of passive margin, due to thermal cooling of the stretch lithosphere, creates a large accommodation space subsequently filled with sediments brought from the emerging continent once the river system is established [1]. This combination of rapid subsidence and sedimentation generates an instable architecture with large shelf progradation on top of early post-rift sediments [5]. Given the typical fine grain lithology of these deposits, in most of the cases they become overpressure and an ideally zone for...

In the precursory section of the paper, the authors succinctly present the Black Sea basin's oceanographic features with a focus on factors that can lead to naval accidents. The Black Sea basin is characterized, especially in winter months, by sudden storms, big waves, and winds, seriously affecting the ships and crews' safety. The said basin has also confined areas with pleasure crafts and commercial ships, offshore platforms with accompanying auxiliary fleet and underwater pipes and installations or shallow wate...

Continuous measurements of deformations of the Earth's crust make it possible to record changes in their character in several characteristic parameters. Such parameters include the amplitude, phase, and frequency of periodic oscillations, for each characteristic frequency separately, as well as random typical or atypical artifacts. All this information with proper processing can be used for various purposes, one of the most important tasks in this case is to reliably identify earthquake precursors. These studies r...

Global event such as war, pandemic, political embargos affect overall economy of airline carrier by influencing the most important variables such as load factor or fuel prices. Aim of all companies is to be profitable, what means to cover all constant costs and fuel costs with profit from tickets which are closely linked with load factor. In this study we chose to study economic impact of COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on load factor and fuel prices and overall economy. To describe the problem, we chose yearly e...

In this work, we provide a framework for assessing cross-boundary wildfire exposure and a case study application in the region of Macedonia, Greece. The required spatial layers describing topography, fuels/ vegetation and ignition location were retrieved from open-access international and national databases, while climate data were obtained from remote automatic weather stations. We processed the spatial layers to derive the required inputs for the Minimum Travel Time fire spread algorithm. Hourly and daily weathe...

In remote, hard-to-reach areas, renewable energy resources such as the sun or wind are available and can be used to produce green electricity at competitive prices. The disadvantage is that we do not always have the source of energy available (sun at night or continuous wind). This disadvantage can be overcome by using hybrid combinations of two or more renewable energy sources together with the storage of the energy produced, thus ensuring the supply of electricity at very good performance levels and with low cos...

This work studied the problem of the joint use of Gauss - Laplace and B (beta) distributions to describe the disintegration of minerals of polymineral ores, which is associated with the liberation of mineral grains - the release of monomineral particles from intergrowths with other minerals. The basic position of the work is the dependence of the result of reducing the size of mineral particles on the energy expended on this process, postulated in the mineral processing theory. This dependence was taken into accou...

The idea to analyse the heat transfer between flats through internal walls is based on long-time question: ?How much will the heating demand of a flat increase if the neighbouring flat is not heated or uses a attenuation heating mode during the day??. It is a very complex question due to the complexity of the task and there are many factors that influence the heat transfer between flats. The goal of analysis is to find out how the material of inter-flat wall affects the heat transfer between flats by using differe...

By building artificial landscape elements, significant changes occur in the spatial structure of the city. The intensification of the formation of paved surface changes the hydrological characteristics of the area. Impermeable surface prevents the penetration of atmospheric waters into the soil horizon, which causes an increase in the volume of runoff, flood peak, and pollution loads in urban stormwater. As a consequence of this phenomenon, during heavy rains, a critical part of the city may be flooded. To reduce ...

Innovative and modern directions, especially BIM and its subsequent extension to CIM, can be considered to be the main topics of construction development. The work connects individual innovative areas of a comprehensive view of the entire life cycle of buildings in connection with and with regard to the entire built-up area and offers new knowledge for urban management, facility management and other fields of construction. The second part uses a 3D model of the city to simulate the spread of pollution in the devel...

Naturally regenerated birch (Betula spp.) stands, to a large extent formed on abandoned agricultural lands, is a notable part of the privately owned forests in Latvia. Birch is fast growing and less frequently affected by abiotic and biotic factors (like dendrophagous insects, cervids, drought) than other main commercial tree species in Latvia. However, wind storms, predicted to increase in frequency in future, is an important risk in birch stands. Therefore, the aim of our study was to assess the snapping height ...

The aim of the work is to point up on the relation among Arson criminality and social network groups. The impact of the internet social networks on arson crime is discussed in the paper. The impact of the top social networks incl. facebook or twitter is generally very high on the society. The arson criminality is partly hidden in the fire statistics especially in Slovak republic were the fire cases investigated with unknown fire source usually point up on the unknown perpetrator. Fire related crimes are often disc...

The study was aimed at monitoring social responsibility and environmental risks of the largest Russian metallurgical companies based on public reports and other sources of information. The methodological basis of the study was the regulatory documents on environmental safety, sustainable development standards in the field of ecology; information and rating agencies data; Internet resources of metallurgical companies, their financial and environmental reports, analytical reviews; works of foreign and Russian scient...

Since Latvia joined the European Union (hereinafter the EU) in 2004, socio-economic territorial development in the regions of the country has been unbalanced, increasing regional disparities. At NUTS3 level, there are six statistical regions in Latvia. Zemgale is one of the regions of Latvia. Since 1992, two administrative and territorial reforms (hereinafter ATR) have been implemented in Latvia, and in 2021 it is planned to carry out the third administrative and territorial reform. In June 2020, the new ATR was a...

Unequal distribution of annual precipitation is negative trend of last year?s influencing primary agricultural field production. One of the natural possibility for elimination of this gesture is to increase patience to the actual conditions and functionality of root system of the plants. Among possible abilities of field crops protection to abiotic stresses during vegetation period belongs strengthening of their natural tolerance. Present situation of soil degradation does not allow to plants sufficiently deploy r...

In today's world, shopping represents a significant part of everyone's life. The interaction between the customer and store staff has grown to be more critical than ever. To facilitate a pleasant and engaging shopping experience, we acknowledge a market gap and a real competition for developing innovative tools that can be used by both parties: the customers, which need their requirements fulfilled, and the store staff, that can use these tools to satisfy customers' needs further by targeting the correct audience....

Drought is a phenomenon with a possible negative effect on agroecosystems. It can cause significant impact and damages on crop, when the water balance is seriously affected. But additional harmful effects can be observed also on the whole agroecosystem. This is connected to the land surface and vadose zone, to the physical and chemical properties of soil and water; to the adjacent organisms, etc. To prevent and mitigate the possible dangerous effects of importance is best to know all the specifics of the drought p...

The aim of the paper is to propose some financial scenarios for recovery of natural disaster damages based on insurances and credits. In recent years, there has been an increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters worldwide. It is well known that natural disasters can affect companies by damaging or completely destroying their material assets. This leads to a partial or complete economic activity interruption of the affected companies. The study focuses on the direct material damage to the companies...

In the present study, in laboratory conditions, a series of experiments were conducted to study the immobilizing ability of peats of Electrochemical Plant (Zelenogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia). It has been found that the studied sorbents have a significant sorption capacity and a reliable conservation ability towards uranium ions that prevent its spread outside the sludge storage. For quantitative characterization and calculation of sorption coefficients, laboratory experiments were conducted for three samples o...

To date, there is an increase in the incidence of skin and subcutaneous tissue diseases, despite the variety of treatment methods. One of the promising class of biomaterials for the treatment of skin diseases can be coatings based on hydrogels. The purpose of this study was to obtain collagen-acrylic hydrogels with various technological parameters (varying the synthesis temperature and the degree of neutralization of acrylic acid) with the specified properties by radical polymerization. The chemical structure of t...

Urbanization today is accompanied by an increasing interest in outdoor recreation and nature-oriented tourism. The topic becomes interesting in light of the most popular world practices to develop nature-oriented tourism and recreation in special protected natural areas. Specific spatial consequences for the sustainable development as for urbanized areas both for reserves are discovered. The territory of a reserve becomes a place of environmental stress (consider the goals of nature reservation), as well as social...