Mental health concerns are surging worldwide and workers in the construction industry have been found to be particularly vulnerable to these challenges. Stress, depression, addictions, suicides, and ...other key indicators of poor mental health have been found to be highly prevalent among construction workers. Critically, researchers have also found a link between how stress in the workplace impacts the overall safety performance of an individual. However, the burgeoning nature of the research has stifled the determination of feasible and actionable interventions on jobsites. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between work-related stressors found on construction jobsites and self-reported injury rates of workers. To accomplish this goal, a meta-analysis methodology was used, wherein a comprehensive literature search was conducted to identify key work-related stressors and questionnaires used in the construction industry’s safety domain to assess stress. Using a formal meta-analysis approach that leverages the findings from past studies, a more holistic determination of the relationship between work-related stressors and injury rates among workers was performed. Ninety-eight studies were reviewed, and seven were selected that fulfilled pre-determined validated inclusion criteria for eligibility in the meta-analysis. The results revealed 10 salient work-related stressors among construction workers. Of these ten, seven work-related stressors were identified as significant predictors of injury rates among workers: job control, job demand, skill demand, job certainty, social support, harassment and discrimination, and interpersonal conflicts at work. This study represents a significant first step toward formally identifying work-related stressors to improve working conditions, reduce or eliminate injuries on construction sites, and support future research.
•The core dimensions of construction safety climate remains unknown.•A comprehensive literature review on construction safety climate was conducted.•A meta-analysis of eleven empirical studies was ...conducted.•The relationship between each climate dimension and safety performance was modeled.•Five safety climate dimensions correlated strongly with safety performance.
This study investigated the empirical relationship between measures of construction safety climate dimensions and safety performance. A comprehensive review of existing literature of construction safety climate was conducted to: (1) review the questionnaires used to measure safety climate dimensions in the construction industry; (2) identify the salient dimensions of safety climate; and (3) establish a consistent definition of each safety climate dimension. Then, a statistical meta-analysis of the empirical relationship between construction safety climate dimensions and safety performance was performed. 107 studies were reviewed, and 11 studies were included in the meta-analysis. The review indicated that 14 construction safety climate dimensions were commonly used to assess safety climate. Of the 14 dimensions, five— supervisor’s safety role (r = 0.30, 95% CI = 0.07 to 0.50), management commitment to safety (r = 0.27, 95% CI = 0.23 to 0.31), safety rules and procedures (r = 0.25, 95% CI = 0.12 to 0.37), individual responsibility to health and safety (r = 0.23, 95% CI = 0.17 to 0.31, and training (r = 0.10, 95% CI = 0.03 to 0.17)—were identified as commonly used predictors of injury rates. The results can be used by researchers and practitioners in this burgeoning field to standardize the assessment of safety climate and to validate the use of safety climate as a predictor of safety performance.
Construction safety prediction is an emerging field where various forms of information and analytical techniques are used to predict the likelihood or severity of a future injury. A review of this ...literature reveals that even though the approaches are used for the same goal of predicting future safety outcomes, they are modeled independently and exclusively from one another. To organize thinking in safety prediction, the literature is organized into four operationally-defined predictive families: (1) safety risk assessment, which considers the characteristics and dangers of the work; (2) precursor analysis, which considers the conditions of the workers; (3) leading indicators, which consider the quantity of safety management activities; and (4) safety climate assessments, which considers worker perceptions of safety. Additionally, a unified model is proposed where the four families are considered together and opportunities for synergy and cross-validation are exploited. Researchers may benefit from this model as they create points of departure, propose and test novel approaches, and attempt to contextualize their findings within the existing body of literature. Furthermore, practitioners may use the model to make more accurate and robust safety predictions that account for the interconnectedness of the work attributes, human resources, and management strategies that affect safety.
Diesel generators are being used as a source of electricity in different parts of the world. Because of the significant expense in diesels cost and the requirement for a greener domain, such electric ...generating systems appear not to be efficient and environmentally friendly and should be tended to. This paper explores the attainability of utilizing a sustainable power source based on a cross-breed electric system in the cement factory in Salalah, Oman. The HOMER software that breaks down the system setup was utilized to examine the application and functional limitations of each hybridized plan. The result showed that a renewable-energy (RE)-based system has a lower cost of energy (COE) and net present cost (NPC) compared to diesel generator-based hybrid electric and standalone systems. Although the two pure renewable hybrid energy systems considered in this study displayed evidence of no emissions, lower NPC and COE values are observed in the photovoltaic/battery (PV/B) hybrid energy system compared with photovoltaic/wind turbine/battery (PV/WT/B). The PV/WT/B and PV/B systems have higher electricity production and low NPC and COE values. Moreover, the PV/B has the highest return on investment (ROI) and internal rate of return (IRR), making the system the most economically viable and adjudged to be a better candidate for rural community electrification demands.
Researchers and leading industry practitioners have turned to proactive safety metrics, such as safety leading indicators and safety climate, as predictors of future safety performance. Current ...academic research shows that the relationships between safety leading indicators and safety lagging indicators remain inconsistent, as well as the relationships between the dimensions of safety climate and safety performance. In addition, prior studies have measured the predictive capacity of these constructs separately even though they are logically associated with one another. Standardizing the measurement of proactive safety metrics and understanding how they relate to one another may facilitate consistency among the indicators or dimensions that define the two metrics, and such an understand may be helpful when pursuing efficient, multi-dimensional, and unified techniques for safety monitoring and prediction. This dissertation therefore aims to (1) empirically validate the relationship between safety leading indicators and safety performance, (2) empirically validate the relationship between the dimensions of construction safety climate and safety performance, and (3) develop a hypothetical exploratory model based on the theoretical differences between safety leading indicators and safety climate and empirically investigate using the structural equation modeling technique with data collected in the field. The first meta-analysis of construction safety leading indicators and safety climate dimensions is used to quantify the extent to which safety leading indicators and the dimensions of safety climate predict safety performance. The results of the two meta-analyses offer a set of common safety leading indicators and safety climate dimensions that positively correlate with safety performance. Data collected from a survey of 106 construction workers at nine construction job sites in the US were used to build the structural equation model to investigate the association between safety leading indicators and safety climate. The results show a positive relationship between safety leading indicators and safety climate. This dissertation is the first work that standardizes, defines, and measures these relationships. Future work might expand the hypothetical exploratory model to include other construction safety predictors (e.g., precursor analysis) and empirically validate the relationships among them to advance the accuracy of construction safety prediction.
Heusler-type Fe2AlVxTi1-x alloys offer an alternative solution for the generation of thermoelectric power near room temperature. In the current research, thermoelectric properties of the p-type ...Fe2AlV0.9Ti0.1 and Fe2AlV0.9Ti0.1/CNT alloys, prepared by SPS, were studied. Carbon nanotubes (CNT) were used as dopants to improve the seebeck coefficient and electrical conductivity. Upon doping with CNT, the thermal conductivity was significantly reduced, meanwhile, the value of the power factor increased from 0.45 to 1.55 mW/mK2 at around 330 K. The effect of CNT inclusions on the thermoelectric parameters of Fe2AlVxTi 1-x compounds was systematically studied. When compared to Fe2AlV0.9Ti0.1, which had a figure of merit of just 0.02 at 330 K, the CNT-containing samples showed a significantly improved figure of merit up to 0.07. We offer a novel technique to improve the performance of Fe2AlV alloys.
Bulk products of crystalline Bi2Se3-xTex alloys (x =0.0, 0.1, 0.3, 0.5) were prepared using simple melting synthesis. Crystalline features, microstructure, and surface morphologies of the synthesized ...samples were examined via X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscope, and energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer. Elemental distribution was studied by energy dispersive analysis of X-ray spectroscopy. Polycrystalline of rhombohedral crystal structure was observed for the concerned samples. Perfect crystallinity and micro-scalability of the prepared were also reflected by the physic-chemical properties of each sample. Thermal behavior was studied throughout differential scanning calorimetry and thermo-gravimetric analysis showing that the samples are of high stability over high temperature range. Physic-chemical properties were determined in terms of experimental density. These properties were compactness value, molar volume and the percentage of free volume. Density of Bi2Se3 alloy was obtained at 7.37 gm/cm3. The Te doping enhanced the density of the Bi2Se3-xTex system. The most Te doped alloy showed density of 9.018 gm/cm3. All other physic-chemical properties showed strong dependence on the Tea amounts in the system.
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