HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY (22-11-2016)

Lebanon ❤

Arc Flash Safety

What is an Arc Flash?

An arc flash is a short circuit through air that flashes over from one exposed live conductor to another conductor or to ground.

It is a phenomenon that occurs when the electric current leaves its intended path and travels through air from one conductor to another, or to ground.

The results are often violent and if a human is in close proximity to the arc flash, serious injury and even death can occur.

Causes of Arc flash are:

• Arc Flash Icon
• Dust
• Dropping tools
• Accidental touching
• Condensation
• Material failure
• Corrosion
• Faulty Installation
• Coming close to a high-amp source with a conductive object can cause the electricity to flash over.
• Dropping a tool or otherwise creating a spark can ignite an arc flash
• Equipment failure due to use of substandard parts, improper installation, or even normal wear and tear Breaks or gaps in insulation.

Three factors determine the severity of an arc flash injury:

1. Proximity of the worker to the hazard
2. Temperature
3. Time for circuit to break

Because of the violent nature of an arc flash exposure when an employee is injured, the injury is serious – even resulting in death. It’s not uncommon for an injured employee to never regain their past quality of life. Extended medical care is often required, sometimes costing in excess of $1,000,000.

..the companies that recycle in Lebanon !!

NordLink – A Landmark Project Enabling A More Interconnected Europe

NordLink – A Landmark Project Enabling A More Interconnected Europe

DivePro

Process Safety Lessons from House, M.D

Posted by AnnMarie Fauske on Tue, Jan 06, 2015 @ 01:09 PM

FOX’s “House, M.D.” follows the weekly adventures of the curmudgeonly Dr. House, a  brilliant  doctor who often rubs his colleagues and patients the wrong way. In a recently aired episode, Dr. House treats a legendary blues musician who has been given only weeks to live. The musician wants to pull the plug because he has a (supposedly) fatal disease that would keep him from ever playing music again. Dr. House intervenes (illegally) but ends up saving the musician’s life and restores his ability to play music. In the process, the musician and House have a discussion about what makes life worth living. It comes out that what makes both House and the musician great is their deep love for a particular craft. Their respective arts are what made them who they are – they both can’t live without doing what they love to do.  While this is a nice story - what does it have to do with process safety?

There are two lessons to be learned from Dr. House – the first is that most of us are not legendary doctors or blues musicians. That is to say – most of us are quite normal. For most of us, we get up and go to work – we give our best, and then we come home. But there are some people who simply live and breathe the work that they do. These are the true ‘experts’ in a given field. When things get hairy – we rely on these experts to come in and solve the problem. The “House, M.D.” episode illustrates the importance of these type of people, because it is people like this who are literally obsessed with their field that have the nuanced level of understanding necessary to know when someone is actually fatally sick or when there is still hope.

The second lesson is that sometimes a diagnosis can be wrong. The same is true in engineering. We often encounter chemical systems that have been tested and are quote-on-quote ‘safe’, when in reality, there are other serious issues present. For example - testing may be conducted on a sample per a standard method – but that method may not accurately represent process conditions. Conversely, we’ve reviewed work where a relief vent has been put in that is ridiculously oversized – leading to unnecessary costs for the consumer. The difference in both cases is having the right person to do the work.

Fauske & Associates, LLC will likely never become a syndicated TV show – our cast of ‘characters’ is far too normal to make for good TV. However, we are a firm of highly gifted, dedicated individuals who live and breathe process safety testing and engineering. We truly are experts in the fields of nuclear and chemical process safety. The next time you have an engineering issue – do you want to have just any firm doing your work, or do you want the guys that are obsessed with understanding and characterizing severe accidents? 

#Throwback #SF

OSHA Law Changing in California In 2015 | EHS Works

OSHA Law Changing in California In 2015 | EHS Works

Substation Fire Incident/Accidents

The 1512 series for use by emergency management centers goal is to support efficient communication for the real-time, interagency management of transportation-related events. Those events include incidents, emergencies, accidents, planned roadway closures, special events, and disasters caused by humans or natural events. Those events include any such event that impacts transportation systems or that causes a report to be received by an emergency management system, whether or not the event actually affects a transportation system and whether or not a response is required. This bundle includes: IEEE Std 1512-2006; IEEE std 1512.1-2006, IEEE Std 1512.2-2004; IEEE Std 1512.3-2006

The electricity travels from the generator to the electrical switchyard, across a series of transmission lines and substation transformers until it is delivered into consumers' homes and businesses.

Fire Accident at one of the substations in the country - source: bintjbeil TV

Smart Irrigation System Edyn Aims to Simplify Growing

Edyn won’t just read soil and optimize irrigation – it will tell you what’s growing successfully around the region. Now there’s no excuse for a poor green thumb!

Last fall, I came across some really interesting reads regarding in-ground technology that viticulturists were utilizing in order to optimize the growth of their grapes while also minimizing wasted water and energy. Different variations of smart watering technology have been adopted by the agriculture industry, but like many innovations, they have been limited to large businesses. However, the development of Edyn, a wi-fi based sensor and valve that reads the soil like a psychic reads palms (but more reliably than most psychics), aims to bring affordable "smart plant growing sensors" to the masses. Edyn makes two products, the Edyn garden sensor and Edyn smart valve. The garden sensor assesses soil nutrition via sensors that are powered by a small solar panel, which pumps back a variety of critical growing information, including humidity, ambient temperature, light intensity and soil electrical properties, right to an app on your smartphone. The Edyn garden sensor communicates wirelessly with the Edyn smart valve which can be plugged directly into sprinkler systems to efficiently control waterings. (The EPA cites that some experts suggest as much as 50% of water used for irrigation is wasted due to evaporation, wind and runoff!).

This technology is combined with Photovoltaic Cells as a renewable source of energy to enhance efficiency and ensure in the same time the reliability of smart watering technology.

The innovative thing about this product is the availability of different forms of information returned to the user. Instead of only Quantitative readings, the data sent will include additional information about plant optimization growth such as: When to grow it, what to grow nearby it, and whether the soil itself needs to be adjusted through assets like time and compost products and quantities.

The uniqueness of this innovation is in the real-time data sent to the user on crop success and the incorporation with LEED projects concerning outdoor water use reduction.

Border to Border ride

نظم الاتحاد اللبناني للدراجات برعاية قائد الجيش اللبناني العماد جان قهوجي ودعم اللجنة الاولمبية اللبنانية طواف درّاجات "من الحدود الى الحدود" بتاريخ (3-8- 2014) (مسافته 220 كيلومتر) من أقصى الشمال (عند نقطة العريضة) الى اقصى الجنوب (الناقورة).

نقطة الوصول من بيروت (الواجهة البحريّة) الى النّاقورة

يتابع الجيش اللبناني نشاطاته الرياضيّة والبطولات العسكريّة بمشاركة العديد من الشخصيّات العسكريّة والمدنيّة والاتحادات الرياضيّة، في وقت يواجه فيه الارهاب والتطرّف على جميع المستويات.

للمزيد من الأخبار: www.lebarmy.gov.lb 

Euphormia: a new Algorithm uniting Europe's Electrical Fiefdoms

Some six decades since Europe began to trade certain goods freely across its borders, electricity is finally joining the common market. In May, 16 countries, accounting for three-quarters of Europe’s power consumption, completed the adoption of a common system for cross-border trading that is now setting wholesale electricity prices from Spain to Finland and from the United Kingdom to Austria.

Photo: Planet Observer/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

No Borders: Images from Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 show Europe’s unified electrical landscape.

Integrating the world’s largest synchronized power grid is possible because of a sophisticated optimization algorithm for Europe’s day-ahead power markets—the Pan-European Hybrid Electricity Market Integration Algorithm, or Euphemia. This algorithm crunches every buy and sell bid submitted to the participating national and regional power markets. It simultaneously allocates rights to transborder transmission and sets the power prices for each market, outputting a selection of trades for the following day.

Euphemia’s goal is to maximize what economists call the “social welfare” of the region by maximizing the use of its most efficient power supplies and thus minimizing overall costs to consumers. “Where there are price differentials in neighboring markets, the process is designed to make sure there’s full use of the transmission paths between them,” says Mark Bartholomew, an energy market specialist with the Birmingham, England–based law firm SGH Martineau, which helped bring U.K. transmission operator National Grid into the scheme.

A consortium of power exchanges and transmission operators began building Euphemia in 2011. The optimization scheme is based on one implemented in 2010 to link the markets of Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Features were added to meet the unique requirements of new markets such as Spain, the U.K., and the Nordic countries. For example, Euphemia can enforce limits on how quickly power levels change on Scandinavian grids, in order to moderate frequency variation there.

Euphemia was built to meet the European Commission’s goal of unifying all of Europe’s power markets by 2015, and that unified market has huge growth potential. Just 11.5 percent of the 3,355 terawatt-hours of energy consumed in Europe last year crossed borders.

Europe has started trading electricity across its borders in a day-ahead market

Euphemia should help boost trading volume. Under the old system, parties wishing to trade internationally had to seek out exchanges. And executing trades required separate transactions for energy and for transmission, so traders had to bid for power before securing the means to move it (or vice versa). Euphemia cuts through the complexity by pairing bids with international counterparts as its software sees fit. “The traders just buy and sell on their national exchanges in the regular way, and all of the cross-border things happen automatically,” says Bartholomew.

The EC’s vision is for this common system to absorb more markets until it covers all of Europe’s cross-border trading. However, some countries concerned about the efficiency and safety of the system are holding out for upgrades that take better account of the physics of the transmission grid.

The problem is that real power flows pay no heed to markets and national borders. Consider Poland’s dilemma. North-south flows within Germany and between Germany and Austria loop out across the Polish border and overload Poland’s lines. The problem can extend onto other grids such as the Czech Republic’s, and it’s especially severe when Germany’s northern wind farms are running full tilt.

Germany is planning internal high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines whose controllability will help keep its flows on course [see “Germany Jump-starts the Supergrid,” IEEE Spectrum, May 2013]. Regional transmission operators have also collaborated to use existing HVDC lines to combat the flows. Danish and Swedish operators help by using a pair of HVDC lines to push power clockwise around the Baltic Sea, an electrical twist that has the effect of pulling German power away from the Polish frontier.

Robert Poprocki, deputy director at the Warsaw-based PSE Operator, says this Baltic HVDC redispatching scheme pushed more than 120 gigawatt-hours of electricity around the Baltic last year, but it has not completely solved the problem. Still, the trick consumes no power and the benefits are cost-effective, says Poprocki.

PSE postponed the linking of its market with Germany and Austria over concerns that this would exacerbate the flows. But in April, the eastern European countries relented after gaining assurances from Germany and Austria that commercial power exchanges would be limited in some way to safeguard PSE’s grid.

Transmission experts say a more radical reengineering of power markets will ultimately be needed, one that pays less heed to national borders. “Today the borders are drawn at the wrong places,” says Alexander Wirth, a transmission expert with Swissgrid and operational manager of the Transmission System Operator Security Cooperation initiative.

Rather than trading between countries, Wirth and other experts say, optimization schemes such as Euphemia should manage trading across the system’s real transmission constraints. “Only 2 percent of congestion is located at borders,” says Wirth.

Such a system implemented today would likely cut Germany in half and merge its halves with neighboring countries. It is also beyond what European states are ready to consider, Wirth says. That could take another decade. In the meantime, grid operators can look forward to same-day trades. Those will likely start testing by October.

This article originally appeared in print as “An Algorithm Unites Europe’s Electrical Fiefdoms.”

Asia

Being a Photographer is no more on the "to be" list ..

After all, "photography" is not one of my favorite hobbies. But I would love to share with you - from time to time - some amazing photos for our beloved country !!

بقولوا تجنّبوا لبنان !

New Battery Tech Could Turn Waste Heat to Electricity

Read more: New Battery Tech Could Turn Waste Heat to Electricity

Estimated US Energy use in 2013

Secular Club @ AUB Outdoors

Source: AUB Facebook Official Page

تميّز النادي العلماني في الجامعة الأميركيّة في بيروت هذه السّنة بالصبغة الصينيّة - AUB Outdoors 2014

Velo Labs Launches a Connected, Solar-Powered Bike Lock

Velo Labs Launches a Connected, Solar-Powered Bike Lock

Brainwash