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.

These days, a kind of information embargo is increasingly being applied, to ensure that only selected scientific information is accessible only to selected recipients at the right time.

The main idea of this article claims that the dominance of modern media technologies over the contemporary sphere of intersubjectivity reveals certain phenomena in the human world that did not exist in the pre-Internet epochs. One of them is technoratiomorphism. I use this term to define a hybrid operating in accordance with biological ratiomorphic mechanisms and overlapping with technological rationality. I also indicate some effects which are brought into social and individual existence by the presence of technoratiomorphism in communication. In my consideration I refer to Konrad Lorenz’s position and evolutionary epistemology, in general. I also interweave them with certain themes found in Stanisław Lem’s works.

The level of sales of a given good depends largely on the distribution network. An analysis of the distribution network allows companies to optimize business activity, which improves the efficiency and profitability of a company’s sales with an immediate effect on profit growth. The so-called spatial analysis is highly useful in this regard. The paper presents an analysis of the network of authorized dealers of the Polish Mining Group for the Opolskie Province. The analysis was done using GIS (SIP) tools. The purpose of the analysis was to present tools that could be used to verify an existing distribution network, to optimize it, or to create a new sales outlet. The prresented tools belong to GIS operations used to process data stored in Spatial Information System resources. These are so-called geoprocessing tools. The article contains several spatial analyses, which results in choosing the optimum location of the distribution point in terms of the defined criteria. The used tools include a spatial intersection and sum. Geocoding and the so-called cartodiagram were also used. The presented analysis can be performed for both the network of authorized retailers within a region, a city or an entire country. The presented tools provide the opportunity to specify the target consumers, areas where they are located and areas of potential consumer concentration. This allows the points of sale in areas with a high probability of finding new customers to be located, which enables the optimal location to be chosen, for example, in terms of access to roads, rail transport, locations of the right area and neighborhood. Spatial analysis tools will also enable the coal company to verify its already existing distribution network.

The article presents results of the author’s bachelor thesis, which deals with detailed cataloguing and analysing of findings of so-called Scythian character in the Moravia in the late Early Iron Age period. The author based this article on catalogue from his thesis. Relevant analogies and typological assignments were studied for concerning every subject in the catalogue and on their basis there was made general chronological classification of each piece. The aim of this article is to present observations that resulted from a detailed evaluation, on its basis occurrence of the subjects of so-called Scythian origin in the Moravia were divided into three time horizons.

The article discusses issues related to improving the energy efficiency of heat supply systems. It draws attention to the need to take action not only for large objects and systems, but also for individual buildings and their boiler plants. Heat supply system monitoring allows for the diagnosis of the weakest elements and making decisions leading to the improvement of energy efficiency. In the case of the boiler room where the research was carried out, the results of such monitoring convinced to equip boilers with an additional automatic control system, with an algorithm limiting the number of burner switching cycles and shutdowns. Limiting the number of switching on the burners, as in the case of other combustion and electric devices, has a significant impact on the energy efficiency of the entire system. In addition, it also increases the durability of the devices, and thus reduces costs of servicing and repairs. The simplest control algorithms, often used in controllers installed in the boiler units, do not provide optimization in this respect. The external device used has allowed the number of burners on and off cycles to be limited while maintaining the quality of the heat supply to the heating installation and the heat treatment system.

The material also presents other ways to improve the energy efficiency of the heat supply system in existing multi-family buildings.

The aim of the article is to diagnose the regional diversification of development in the axiological context. The starting point in this analysis is the term: development. This category is understood in a multidimensional manner. Presented in this paper conceptual model of development allows to distinguish three levels of analysis of the development process: material, social and cultural. Identification of the axiological phenomenon of the diversification of regional development in this research is ultimately served by the systematization tool – typology, introducing the division into the culture of honour, achievements and joy.

In the introduction, examples from the Croatian language are used to exemplify the anthroponymization of appellatives (e.g. appellative kovač → family name Kovač), appelativization of anthroponyms (e.g. family name Penkala → appellative penkala) and transonymization (e.g. hydronym Una → first name Una). All of the listed transitions represent evidence that there are no firm boundaries between the onymic and appellative lexicon, nor within the onymic lexicon.

The central part of the study is dedicated to the so-called pure transanthroponymization of the type first name Vinko → family name Vinko. Pure transanthroponymization results in different combinations of homonymic pairs of anthroponyms in the anthroponymic formula / anthroponymic formulae (e.g. David David; David Vinko, Vinko David; David Novak — Josip David). Given that context does not contribute to the correct understanding of the message transmitted by the anthroponymic formula in the case of first name-family name homonymy, possible consequences of this homonymy for onomastic communication are emphasised. Also listed are examples of anthroponymic formulae of the Saša Pavlić type (it is impossible to distinguish whether the person is male or female from the first name) and Ivan Vinko Boris (it is impossible to distinguish whether the person has two first names or two family names from the anthroponymic formula) which also “stifle” the onomastic information.

The author concludes that the boundaries between first names and family names are not fixed and cautions of the need to carefully select the first name of a child bearing a family name created by the pure transanthroponymization of a first name.

Providing informal care to adults, especially elderly people, may affect many aspects of caregivers’ life, such as: physical and mental health, financial situation, social contacts, etc. Supporting dependent seniors is associated to a higher level of stress, burden and depression as well as higher mortality. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between caregiving for adults and the subjective quality of life among Poles aged 50–69. We took into account not only the fact of providing care to adult people, but also its beginning, continuation and ending between waves. We assumed that subjective quality of life may be expressed by two variables: one describing life satisfaction, and the second one – loneliness. We used the panel subsample from the Generation and Gender Surveys (GGS) carried out in Poland in 2010/2011 and in 2014. We found a negative effect of stopping caregiving between waves on wellbeing of women-carers, which may be related to the loss of a close person. Moreover, providing care for a longer period of time increases loneliness, which confirms that providing support to others may lead to isolation and smaller social networks.

Over the past decade, the growing demand for imported coal from consumers (mainly Asian) coincided with supply constraints on the part of major suppliers. The sequence of events is referred to as force majeure. There were many events in the exporting countries, mainly including the cyclone and floods in Australia (Queensland, the world’s largest hard coking coal mining region). Imbalance between supply and demand causes commodity prices to be subject to cyclical changes, but in recent years the frequency and dynamics of these changes in the international metallurgical market (hard coking coal, semi-soft coking coal, PCI coal) has been extremely high. China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of coking coal, played a leading role in these events. Political action by the Chinese authorities regarding their domestic mining and metallurgical industries and the coke-chemical industry has made the country dethrone Japan since 2013 and has become a global leader in metallurgical coal imports. The rise of China’s importance in coal trading has become an important benchmark for monitoring market trends and benchmarking benchmarks. The market has become more bipolar and CFR China’s prices (in addition to Australia’s FOB prices). The paper describes the path of pricing mechanism changes in international trade contracts for metallurgical coal, against the background of market conditions that generate these changes.

We develop a fully Bayesian framework for analysis and comparison of two competing approaches to modelling daily prices on different markets. The first approach, prevailing in financial econometrics, amounts to assuming that logarithms of prices behave like a multivariate random walk; this approach describes logarithmic returns most often by the VAR(1) model with MGARCH (or sometimes MSV) disturbances. In the second approach, considered here, it is assumed that daily price levels are linked together and, thus, the error correction term is added to the usual VAR(1)–MGARCH or VAR(1)–MSV model for logarithmic returns, leading to a reduced rank VAR(2) specification for logarithms of prices. The model proposed in the paper uses a hybrid MSV-MGARCH structure for VAR(2) disturbances. In order to keep cointegration modelling as simple as possible, we restrict to the case of two prices representing two different markets.

The aim of the paper is to show how to check if a long-run relationship between daily prices exists and whether taking it into account influences our inference on volatility and short-run relations between returns on different markets. In the empirical example the daily values of the S&P500 index and the WTI oil price in the period 19.12.2005 – 30.09.2011 are jointly modelled. It is shown that, although the logarithms of the values of S&P500 and WTI oil price seem to be cointegrated, neglecting the error correction term leads to practically the same conclusions on volatility and conditional correlation as keeping it in the model.

In this paper, we use weekly stock market data to examine whether the volatility of stock returns of ten emerging capital markets of the new EU member countries has changed since the opening of their capital markets. In particular we are interested in understanding whether there are high and low periods of stock returns volatility and what the degree of correlation across these markets is. We estimate a Markov-Switching ARCH (SWARCH) model proposed by Hamilton and Susmel (1994) and we allow for the possibility that two or three volatility regimes may exist for stock returns volatility. The main finding of the present study is that the high volatility of stock returns of all new EU emerging stock markets is associated mainly with the 1997‒1998 Asian and Russian financial crises as well as over the 2007‒2009 financial turmoil, while there is a transition to the low volatility regime as they approach the accession to the EU in 2004. It is also shown that the capital flows liberalization process has resulted in an increase in volatility of stock returns in most cases.

The Author is an expert on United States’ maritime (admiralty) law and on American legislative process.

The Rotterdam Rules, or the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partially by the Sea, drafted by the UN General Assembly on 11 December 2008 (Resolution 63/122), create a new legal order on affreightment and thus aim at replacing the Hague Rules, the Hague-Visby Rules and the Hamburg Rules.

The Author argues that the dominant legislative contribution to the draft is American. The United States have amended their own maritime law and, at the same time, internationalized some of its content. If the US ratification process is completed within the next 2 years with the signature of the President, the USA, representing 25% of the world’s overall tonnage, shall be the game-changer in international law on carriage of goods by the sea.

The European Green Deal is a strategy aimed at making Europe climate neutral in 2050. This work plan consists of several initiatives: European Climate Law, European Climate Pact, adaptation strategy, Farm-to Fork strategy and task to increase the EU 2030 climate target towards 55%. The aim of this article is to present the aims and structure of the European Green Deal with special notice on actions planed within „blue economy”. The maritime sector will have to play a central role in alleviating the multiple demands on the EU's land resources and tackling climate change by improving the use of aquatic and marine resources.

The concept of “places of refuge ” comes from the Convention on Maritime Safety of 1989. The term “port of refuge” had emerged earlier in maritime practice. Resolution A.949/23/ o f the General Assembly of the IMO, from 5 December 2004, speaks of “places of refuge” for ships in need of help. Directive 2002/59/WE o f the European Parliament and Council, setting up a community system of monitoring and of information on the movement of vessels, and abrogating Council Directive 93/75/EWG, introduced places of refuge, drawing on the “Guidelines ” of the IMO. IMO Resolution A.949/23/ became the legal norm valid in Member States. The decree of the Polish Minister for Maritime Economy from 14 September 2007, as executive implementation of legislation of 20 April 2004, concerning a change of legislation in the matter of maritime safety, sets out a plan for offering refuge in Polish maritime waters to vessels that find themselves in danger. The author accepts that a place of refuge may be a natural spot that is appropriate for this purpose, and also a place specially constructed for vessels in danger. It may also be an existing port or part of one.

In this article the author discusses the military aspect of the Convention on the law of the sea of 1982. He touches on: the definition of a warship; the institution of innocent passage; the right of search and inspection, and the right of pursuit; transit through maritime straits; areas ofarmed conflict; mined areas; and the exclusively peaceful use of seas and oceans. The use of armed force at sea is permissible as an act of self-defence as defined in article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The use of armed force at sea is also permissible within the framework of international sanctions authorised by the UN Security Council. However it is not permissible as an act of mutual aid.

This article presents the results of laboratory tests of the physical and mechanical properties of various types of sandstone selected from ten quarries from Carpathian flysch. The parameters were used to evaluate the quality of the sandstone and its suitability for use as armourstone in accordance with applicable standards and quality guidelines. The requirements of the BN-79/8952-31, EN 13383-1:2003 and the CIRIA, CUR, CETMEF (2007) standards were compared. Sandstone can display a large variability of parameters depending on its origin. This, in turn, results in a varying degree of its susceptibility to the destructive effects of water and climate.

Barwne historyczne dzieje klientelizmu jako fenomenu społecznego zawsze miały ścisły związek z władzą polityczną, jej zdobywaniem, podtrzymywaniem i sprawowaniem. Dotyczy to każdego szczebla władzy. Klientelizm jako aktywność niepenalizowana może sprzyjać działaniom pozaprawnym, których celem jest czasami nieuprawnione wpływanie na wyniki rozgrywek wyborczych. W artykule wskazano, jak relacje klientalne na poziomie gmin mogą łączyć się z nieuprawnionym wpływem na losy starć wyborczych w wyborach gminnego organu wykonawczego. W tym celu zaprezentowano wybrane strategie aktorów gminnych, których podstawą jest klientelizm i które wdrażane są w celu modyfikacji wyników wyborów gminnych włodarzy. Artykuł kończy dyskusja w zakresie możliwości wykrywania naruszeń wyborczych za pomocą analiz tzw. bliskich wyborów w schemacie regresji nieciągłej (Regression Discontinuity Design – RDD).

This paper summarizes the activity of the chosen Polish geodetic research teams in 2015–2018 in the fields of Earth: rotation, dynamics as well as magnetic field. It has been prepared for the needs of the presentation on the 27th International Union of Geodesy and Geodynamics General Assembly, Montreal, Canada. The part concerning Earth rotation is mostly focused on the use of modelling of diurnal and subdiurnal components of Earth rotation by including low frequency components of polar motion and UT1 in the analysis, study of free oscillations in Earth rotation derived from both space-geodetic observations of polar motion and the time variation of the second degree gravitational field coefficients derived from Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) observations, new methods of monitoring of Earth rotation, as well as studies on applications of the Ring Laser Gyroscope (RLG) for direct and continuous measurements of changes in Earth rotation and investigations of the hydrological excitation of polar motion. Much attention was devoted to the GRACE-derived gravity for explaining the influence of surface mass redistributions on polar motion. Monitoring of the geodynamical phenomena is divided into study on local and regional dynamics using permanent observations, investigation on tidal phenomena, as well as research on hydrological processes and sea level variation parts. Finally, the recent research conducted by Polish scientists on the Earth’s magnetic field is described.

The recipe as a text type has been investigated among others by such scholars as Carroll (1999), Taavitsainen (2001a, 2001b), Görlach (e.g., 2004) and Mäkinen (2006). Schmidt (1994) distinguishes three types of the recipe: the medical, culinary and general. The majority of research conducted so far deals with the medical recipe or treats the text type as a whole without discussing the differences between the particular sub-types. The few studies devoted exclusively to the culinary recipe usually concentrate on its single features (for instance the presence of null objects, as in Massam and Roberge 1989, or Culy 1996). A diachronic study of the recipe shows the evolution that the text type has undergone, since the earlier a recipe the more it varies from what we know today (cf. e.g., Culy 1996, Martilla 2009). The earliest culinary recipes, written in English, come from the late Middle English period. However, following Hieatt and Jones (1986: 859), “the earliest culinary recipes occur in two Anglo-Norman manuscripts” from the beginning of the Middle English period. The aim of the present paper is to compare the Anglo-Norman and Middle English recipes. The former come from the end of the 13th and early 14th centuries, the latter from the 14th and 15th centuries. The study concentrates on some of the formal features of the texts, such as the length of the recipes, and their structure, esp. such recipe components as the heading and the procedure. The corpus can be divided into two parts: (i) the Anglo-Norman database, which consists of 61 recipes (belonging to two collections), and (ii) the Middle English database, composed of 208 recipes which were either translated or derived from the Anglo-Norman ones.

The paper presents the results of the research on particle size distribution of dust emitted from drybottom boilers burning pulverized coal. A cascade impactor separated fly-ash particles into seven size fractions with the following equivalent aerodynamic diameters: 0.38; 0.88; 1.9; 2.9; 6.3; 10.0 μm. Cumulative size-specific emission factors were determined. In order to obtain some information on the trace elements distribution in the fly-ash size-fraction concentration of Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, As, Zr, Sr, Pb, Br was determined in the samples collected. The elemental analysis was performed by Proton Induced X-Ray Emission Spectroscopy. Small mass loadings obtained from the cascade impactor, which are often insufficient for other analytical methods, are well within the sensitivity range of the PIXE/RBS analysis. The results of the research concerning one of the domestic power stations arc presented as an example.

The paper presents a comparison of selected power technologies from the point of view of emissions of greenhouse gases. Such evaluation is most often based only on analysis of direct emissions from combustion. However, the direct analysis does not show full picture of the problem as significant emissions of GHG appear also in the process of mining and transportation of fuel. It is demonstrated in the paper that comparison of power technologies from the GHG point of view has to be done using the cumulative calculus covering the whole cycle of fuel mining, processing, transportation and end-use. From this point of view coal technologies are in comparable level as gas technologies while nuclear power units are characterised with lowest GHG emissions. Mentioned technologies are compared from the point of view of GHG emissions in full cycle. Specific GHG cumulative emission factors per unit of generated electricity are determined. These factors have been applied to simulation of the influence of introduction of nuclear power units on decrease of GHG emissions in domestic scale. Within the presented simulations the prognosis of domestic power sector development according to the Polish energy policy till 2030 has been taken into account. The profitability of introduction of nuclear power units from the point of view of decreasing GHG emissions has been proved.

Vapordynamic thermosyphon (VDT) is an efficient heat transfer device. The two-phase flow generation and dynamic interaction between the liquid slugs and vapor bubbles in the annular minichannel of the VDT condenser are the main features of such thermosyphon, which allowed to increase its thermodynamic efficiency. VDT can transfer heat in horizontal position over a long distance. The condenser is nearly isothermal with the length of tens of meters. The VDT evaporators may have different forms. Some practical applications of VDT are considered.

An experimental study was conducted in order to investigate two-phase flow regimes and fully developed pressure drop in a mini-size, horizontal rectangular channel. The test section was machined in the form of an impacting tee junction in an acrylic block (in order to facilitate visualization) with a rectangular cross-section of 1.87-mm height on 20-mm width on the inlet and outlet sides. Pressure drop measurement and flow regime identification were performed on all three sides of the junction. Air-water mixtures at 200 kPa (abs) and room temperature were used as the test fluids. Four flow regimes were identified visually: bubbly, plug, churn, and annular over the ranges of gas and liquid superficial velocities of 0.04 ≤ JG ≤ 10 m/s and 0.02 ≤ JL ≤ 0.7 m/s, respectively, and a flow regime map was developed. Accuracy of the pressure-measurement technique was validated with single-phase, laminar and turbulent, fully developed data. Two-phase experiments were conducted for eight different inlet conditions and various mass splits at the junction. Comparisons were conducted between the present data and former correlations for the fully developed two-phase pressure drop in rectangular channels with similar sizes. Wide deviations were found among these correlations, and the correlations that agreed best with the present data were identified.