Objectives In cross sectional studies, relationships between perceived stressors and self-reported health are suspected of mono-method bias related to negative affectivity. The purpose of this work ...was to test if work organisational characteristics (WOC) reported by managers were related to psychological distress (PD) reported by call-handlers, taking into account their perception of work conditions (perceived strain) and usual individual confounders. Method Managers of 107 call-centres were queried by occupational physicians on their call-centres’ WOC. 4002 call-handlers (2,929 women were considered here) of these call-centres completed self-reported questionnaires in order to evaluate perceived work strain (Karasek and Siegrist questionnaires) and PD (12-items General Health Questionnaire). A 2-level analysis tested the relationships between 14 WOC and PD score, with and without adding perceived strain as confounder, assuming that unchanged coefficients between WOC and PD score flag a direct effect of WOC on psychological distress. We also analysed perceived strain as an effect modificator for WOC using interactions. Results Five of 14 WOC were significantly related to the PD score: type of calls, call-centre size, number of activity parameters displayed on screen, instructions for client relationships, and required control role of supervisor. In adding perceived strain, the relationship only remained for the type of call. Conclusions Main results of this study are (1) existence of relationships between WOC reported by managers and psychological distress reported by call-handlers (2) most of effects of WOC are moderated by the perception of work strain.
Le secteur agricole au Maroc repose fortement sur la main-d’œuvre féminine, jouant un rôle crucial dans la production et apportant une expertise spécifique. Cependant, malgré leurs contributions ...inestimables, les ouvrières agricoles font face à des conditions de travail pénibles et à des défis environnementaux menaçant leur santé et leur bien-être. L’objectif principal de cette recherche est de dévoiler les contraintes auxquelles elles sont confrontées, mettant en lumière divers aspects tels que les longues heures de travail, les environnements physiquement exigeants et les risques pour la santé dus aux changements climatiques et aux engrais industriels. Il est également important de comprendre et d’analyser les stéréotypes de genre qui peuvent influencer ces conditions de travail. Afin d’éviter de considérer ce groupe de femmes comme une entité homogène, cette étude adopte une approche microsociologique basée sur l’observation directe des ouvrières dans les champs et les exploitations, ainsi que des entretiens semi-directifs. L’objectif est d’observer de près les ouvrières et d’écouter leurs discours pour mieux comprendre leur expérience et les conditions dans lesquelles elles travaillent. Les résultats de l’étude confirment que, en plus des différenciations genrées dans l’espace et des représentations stigmatisantes de leur entourage, les ouvrières sont confrontées à des obstacles d’accès et d’exercice de leur travail, ainsi qu’à des conséquences néfastes sur leur santé et leur bien-être découlant de leur environnement de travail.
The agricultural sector in Morocco heavily relies on female labor, playing a crucial role in production and providing specific expertise. However, despite their invaluable contributions, female agricultural workers face arduous working conditions and environmental challenges that threaten their health and well-being. The main objective of this research is to unveil the constraints they encounter, shedding light on various aspects such as long working hours, physically demanding environments, and health risks due to climate change and industrial fertilizers. It is also important to understand and analyze gender stereotypes that may influence these working conditions. To avoid considering this group of women as a homogeneous entity, this study adopts a microsociological approach based on direct observation of the workers in the fields and farms, as well as semi-structured interviews. The aim is to closely observe the female workers and listen to their narratives to better understand their experiences and the conditions in which they work. The study’s findings confirm that, in addition to gender differentiations in space and stigmatizing representations from their surroundings, female workers face access and exercise barriers in their work and suffer detrimental consequences to their health and well-being resulting from their working environment.
•A hybrid cooling system is proposed for lithium-ion battery pack in EVs.•Cooling effect and energy consumption of the hybrid system are tested.•Hybrid system reduces Tmax to 29.6 °C and ΔT to 1.6 °C ...in dynamic working condition.•Desired thermal performance is achieved with a 62% reduction in energy consumption.
Lithium-ion batteries have been widely used to propel electric vehicles (EVs) owing to their high energy density, long lifespan, and high stability. However, the inevitable battery heat generation, particularly when there is a rapid increase in power under dynamic working conditions, threatens the safety and performance of EVs. In this study, we develop a hybrid battery thermal management system incorporating micro heat pipe arrays, convective air, and intermittent spray water. The heat pipes siphon the heat from the inside of the battery pack to the outside, and convective air dissipates heat during the normal operation of the EVs, while further cooling is achieved via intermittent spray water at high-power operations. For a 75 Ah lithium-ion battery pack under dynamic working conditions, the proposed hybrid system enables the maximum temperature to be reduced to 29.6°C and the temperature non-uniformity to be 1.6°C, which are 21% and 57% lower than those of thermal management systems without water spraying functions, respectively. Additionally, the energy consumption of the hybrid thermal management system is 4.9 Wh, only accounting for 1.8% of the total battery pack power capacity. Given these advantages, it is expected that the proposed thermal management system is a promising tool to address the practical thermal problems of lithium-ion battery packs used in EVs.
Abstract
Hybrid quantum systems integrating semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) and atomic vapours become important building blocks for scalable quantum networks due to the complementary strengths of ...individual parts. QDs provide on-demand single-photon emission with near-unity indistinguishability comprising unprecedented brightness—while atomic vapour systems provide ultra-precise frequency standards and promise long coherence times for the storage of qubits. Spectral filtering is one of the key components for the successful link between QD photons and atoms. Here we present a tailored Faraday anomalous dispersion optical filter based on the caesium-D
1
transition for interfacing it with a resonantly pumped QD. The presented Faraday filter enables a narrow-bandwidth (Δ
ω
=2
π
× 1 GHz) simultaneous filtering of both Mollow triplet sidebands. This result opens the way to use QDs as sources of single as well as cascaded photons in photonic quantum networks aligned to the primary frequency standard of the caesium clock transition.
Objectives The aims of this position paper are to (i) summarize research on precarious employment (PE) in the context of occupational health; (ii) develop a theoretical framework that distinguishes ...PE from related concepts and delineates important contextual factors; and (iii) identify key methodological challenges and directions for future research on PE and health. Methods This position paper is the result of a working group consisting of researchers from the EU, Turkey and the USA, who have discussed the issue over the course of six months (October 2018-April 2019), meeting both online and face-to-face on several occasions. Results The lack of a common theoretical framework of PE hinders it from becoming an established part of occupational and public health research. There are also issues regarding operationalization in surveys and registers. Further, previous research on PE and health suffers from methodological limitations including inadequate study designs and biased assessments of exposure and outcomes. PE is highly dependent on contextual factors and cross-country comparison has proven very difficult. We also point to the uneven social distribution of PE, ie, higher prevalence among women, immigrants, young and low educated. We propose a theoretical framework for understanding precarious employment as a multidimensional construct. Conclusions A generally accepted multidimensional definition of PE should be the highest priority. Future studies would benefit from improved exposure assessment, temporal resolution, and accounting for confounders, as well as testing possible mechanisms, eg, by adopting multi-level and intersectional analytical approaches in order to understand the complexity of PE and its relation to health.
Titelbild: Bautechnik 8/20
Die Bautechnik,
August 2020, 20200801, Letnik:
97, Številka:
8
Journal Article
Zum Titelbild: Von der Industrie‐ in die Netzwerkökonomie – der derzeit massiv anziehende digitale Strukturwandel bringt neue Arbeitsorganisationen und Arbeitsstile mit sich. Attribute wie „agil, ...teamvernetzt” und „innovationssteigernd” stehen für das, was „New Work” heute meint. Dass diese auch „New Architecture” und „New Working Environment” in Gestalt flexibler Lösungen braucht, ist zwar logisch, hat aber mit der Realität der Arbeitswelt zumeist noch wenig zu tun. Nicht so im Modulbau. Wo ein Neubau als Massivgebäude wenig planerischen Spielraum lässt, hat die ALHO‐Gruppe als wirtschaftliche und maximal flexible Alternative das neue Modulbau‐Mietsystem FAGSI ProCOMFORT entwickelt. Standardisierte Modul‐Bausteine mit hochwertigen Gebäudedetails zum Mieten schließen die Lücke zwischen dauerhaften Modul‐ und temporären Containerbauten und bieten somit das Beste aus zwei Welten. (Foto: FAGSI)
•A correlation analysis algorithm for IMFs reconstruction is proposed.•The CorAA can extract main feature of fault modes and eliminate useless information.•The proposed method can diagnose accurately ...under different working conditions.•The fusion method is superior to peer methods under identical working conditions.
The effective and accurate diagnosis of the fault of a gearbox is crucial. However, differences in working condition significantly affect the energy of the original vibration signals of a gearbox, which makes it difficult to distinguish the faulty signals from normal signals. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an integrated method based on complementary ensemble empirical mode decomposition (CEEMD), sample entropy (SampEn) and the correlation analysis algorithm (CorAA) for the fault diagnosis of a gearbox under different working conditions. In this method, CEEMD is used to decompose the raw vibration signals into sets of finite intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Then, the correlation coefficients between the raw signal and each IMF are calculated using the CorAA. Subsequently, the IMFs with large correlation coefficients are selected for a probabilistic neural network (PNN) to classify the fault patterns. Finally, two cases are studied based on experimental gearbox fault diagnosis data, and the integrated method achieves classification rates of 97.50% and 95.16%. The proposed approach outperforms all other existing methods considered, thus validating its effectiveness and superiority.
•A metric adversarial domain adaptation approach is proposed to successfully achieve cross-domain RUL prediction.•A feature extraction scheme with a dual self-attention module is developed to learn ...features with multi-scale semantics.•A supervised positive contrastive module is designed to maximize the target-specific mutual information.
Many existing domain adaptation-based methods try to derive domain invariant features to address domain shifts and obtain satisfactory remaining useful life (RUL) of bearings under multiple working conditions. However, most methods may not consider local semantics about degradation features and mutual information from target-specific data when aligning distribution discrepancies, thus resulting in limitations. Additionally, the use of contrastive learning to maintain mutual information may introduce unstable negative samples. To overcome these issues, a metric adversarial domain adaptation approach (MADA) is proposed to evaluate the bearing RULs under multiple working conditions. More specifically, an adversarial domain adaptation architecture with a supervised positive contrastive module is developed to consider mutual information without a negative sample, further learning domain invariant features. Also, the dual self-attention module is designed to extract multi-scale contextual semantics between degradation features. Meanwhile, extensive experiments are conducted in twelve cross-domain scenarios for two bearing cases. The experimental results show that the proposed method is more competitive.
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