Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a laser based diagnostics used to study atomic emission from the expanding plasma plume formed during the lasermatter interaction. It provides valuable information about the composition of the target material. LIBS has proved its potential application in the analysis of impurities, pollutants and toxic elements in various types of matrices of diffe...

A review of 4756 deaths investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in 1984-6 found 233 deaths from asphyxiation and poisoning, excluding asphyxiations from trench cave-ins. The highest rates were in the oil and gas industry and in utilities. Toxic gases were the largest group (65) followed by simple asphyxiants (48), mechanical causes (42), and solvents (35). Death...

During surgical procedures using a laser or electrosurgical unit, the thermal destruction of tissue creates a smoke byproduct. Research studies have confirmed that this smoke plume can contain toxic gases and vapors such as benzene, hydrogen cyanide, and formaldehyde, bioaerosols, dead and live cellular material (including blood fragments), and viruses. At high concentrations the smoke causes o...

Assessment of likely consequences of a potential accident is a major concern for loss prevention and safety promotion in process industry. Loss of confinement on a storage tank, vessel or piping on industrial sites could imply atmospheric dispersion of toxic or flammable gases. Gas dispersion forecasting is a difficult task since turbulence modeling at large scale involves expensive calculation...

Crowd animation and simulation have been widely studied over the last decade for many purposes : populating collaborative virtual environments, entertainment and special effects industry and finally simulating behaviors and motion of people in emergency situations for safety systems. This last topic is addressed in this paper. We propose an original enhancement of a well known physics-based ani...

The industrial environment has changed substantially since OSHA first defined confined space entry (CSE) regulation in the late '70s, and gas detection regulation has not kept pace. The standard four-gas monitor is simply insufficient protection from the many--now common--toxic gases and vapors that are major constituents or byproducts of modern industrial processes. Monitors that measure only ...

Flexible films based on novel Te-SnO2 nanocomposites were fabricated for detection of toxic gases at room temperature. The obtained via solvohermal recrystallization pure crystalline tellurium in nitric acid the presence tin chloride. energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and XRD analyses have shown that consists fluffy structures tiny agglomerates nanodimensional irregular blocks hexagona...