AbstractThe widespread coronavirus (COVID-19) has sparked considerable worry among businesses worldwide, including Ghana. Despite a growing body of information on market and business reactions to the ...COVID-19 pandemic, there are few to no studies that have empirically examined the direct impact of COVID-19 on a firm’s financial reporting. The paper employed a panel regression model to examine COVID-19 impacts on a firm’s financial reporting delay over 3 years for 100 firms in Ghana comprising 30 listed firms and 70 private firms. The study’s empirical findings indicate COVID-19 and financial report delays have a positive and significant relationship. The study also established that the positive relationship is more pronounced for low-performing and private firms. The study recommended that a firm’s operational strategies be improved and well-coordinated during pandemics to avoid reporting and subsequent operational delays.
Fault detection model for a variable speed heat pump Boahen, Samuel; Ofori-Amanfo, Kwadwo Boateng; Amoabeng, Kofi Owura ...
Journal of Engineering and Applied Science,
12/2023, Letnik:
70, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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The impact of the COVID pandemic has resulted in many people cultivating a remote working culture and increasing building energy use. A reduction in the energy use of heating, ventilation, and ...air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is necessary for decreasing the energy use in buildings. The refrigerant charge of a heat pump greatly affects its energy use. However, refrigerant leakage causes a significant increase in the energy use of HVAC systems. The development of refrigerant charge fault detection models is, therefore, important to prevent unwarranted energy consumption and
CO
2
emissions in heat pumps. This paper examines refrigerant charge faults and their effect on a variable speed heat pump and the most accurate method between a multiple linear regression and multilayer perceptron model to use in detecting the refrigerant charge fault using the discharge temperature of the compressor, outdoor entering water temperature and compressor speed as inputs, and refrigerant charge as the output. The COP of the heat pump decreased when it was not operating at the optimum refrigerant charge, while an increase in compressor speed compensated for the degradation in the capacity during refrigerant leakage. Furthermore, the multilayer perception was found to have a higher prediction accuracy of the refrigerant charge fault with a mean square error of ± 3.7%, while the multiple linear regression model had a mean square error of ± 4.5%. The study also found that the multilayer perception model requires 7 neurons in the hidden layer to make viable predictions on any subsequent test sets fed into it under similar experimental conditions and parameters of the heat pump used in this study.
Objective: This study examined the food consumption pattern and dietary diversity of a vegetarian population in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana.Methods: A cross-sectional study was employed to ...examine the nutritional status of four (4) vegetarian groups in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. One hundred and twenty-two (122) vegetarians were recruited using the total enumeration technique. Food consumption pattern and dietary diversity were assessed using a validated qualitative food frequency questionnaire and a 24-hour dietary recall, respectively. Dietary diversity was calculated using the FAO guidelines.Results: Sixty eight percent (68%) of the vegetarians reported daily intakes of vegetable protein. Majority of the vegetarians (80.6%) reported daily intakes of cereals and grains while 54% reported daily intakes of tubers. Eighty two percent (82%) and 72% of the vegetarians consumed vegetables and fruits on daily basis respectively. A few ofthe vegetarians (29%) reported daily intakes of fruit juices. Soft drinks, deep fried foods and fast foods were occasionally consumed. About 40.3% of the vegetarians obtained a dietary diversity score of four (4). Majority of them (68.9%) had low dietary diversity.Conclusion: The vegetarians had low dietary diversity which may lead to inadequate nutrient intakes. Thus, there is the need for nutrition-related professionals to give appropriate information on a vegetarian diet and educate vegetarians to include a variety of foods in their diet.