The global energy shortage has revived the interest in hydroelectric power, but extreme geological condition always pose challenges to the construction of hydroelectric power stations with large underground caverns. To solve the problem of safe design of large underground caverns, a Chinese-style intelligent stability design, representing recent developments in Chinese techniques for the constr...

Underground pipelines constitute one of the most important ways to transport large amounts of fluid (e.g. oil and water) through long distances. However, existing leakage detection techniques do not work well in monitoring the underground pipelines due to the harsh underground environmental conditions. In this paper, a new solution, the magnetic induction (MI)-based wireless sensor network for ...

The wide adoption of underground mining has contributed immensely to the rapid growth of the countries’ economy, job creation, gross domestic product, fixed capital formation, gross investment and merchandise exports on an enormous global scale. At the same time, the tedious and dangerous nature of underground mining makes it vulnerable to mine accidents and disasters, such as the fall of loose...

The implementation of underground distribution lines has grown significantly over the last decades due to the rapid increase of electric energy demand. But, the life of underground lines is determined by strong single or multiple stresses, developed during manufacturing and operation. Establishing and predicting the end of life of a distribution underground line is a task for researchers, desig...

The availability of data for the size of the “Underground Economy” is important for macroeconomic policy. We use fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic to construct an annual time-series for the (unobservable) New Zealand underground economy over the period 1968 to 1994. Two input variables are used – the effective tax rate and an index of the degree of regulation. The resulting underground economy t...

This paper presents an underground navigation app “mUvi”. For the indoor navigation of underground users, it only exploits the information from the environment of the user, collected by the internal sensors of the user’s smartphone. Based on an experimental study on the use of smartphone sensors for underground navigation the mobile app uses a combination of microphone and two additional sensor...

BACKGROUND Between September 17 and October 3, 2009, hundreds of workers employed in a manufacturing factory in Shenzhen, a city in south China developed a sudden onset of acute gastroenteritis. A retrospective cohort study is designed to identify the risk factors and control this outbreak. METHODS Information on demographic characteristics, working place, the history of contact with a person...

The projected increases in World population and need for food have recently motivated adoption of information technology solutions in crop fields within precision agriculture approaches. Internet of underground things (IOUT), which consists of sensors and communication devices, partly or completely buried underground for real-time soil sensing and monitoring, emerge from this need. This new par...

In underground mines and tunnels accurate and continuous positioning of moving machines and humans has been studied extensively. Geomagnetic field based positioning is an interesting possibility for this measurement need. Using a commercial smart phone and a new calculation service provided by a Finnish company, a feasibility and accuracy assertion tests were done in Finnish underground mine. F...