On October 23, 2011, a M7.2 earthquake caused damage in a widespread area in the Van province located in eastern Turkey. This strong earthquake was followed by a M5.7 earthquake on November 9, 2011. This sequence of damaging earthquakes led to 644 fatalities. The management during and after these earthquake disaster imposed many critical challenges. In this article, an overview of these challenges is presented based on the observations by the authors in the aftermath of this disaster. This article presents the characteristics of 2011 Van earthquakes. Afterward, the key information related to the four main phases (ie, preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery) of the disaster in Van is presented. The potential strategies that can be taken to improve the disaster management practice are identified, and a set of recommendations are proposed to improve the existing situation.
The present study focuses on the organic Rankine cycle (ORC) integrated into an evacuated tube heat pipe (ETHP), whose systems are an alternative solar energy system to low-efficiency planary collectors. In this work, a detailed thermodynamic and artificial neural network (ANN) analysis was conducted to evaluate the solar energy system. One of the key parameters of sustainable approaches focused on exergy efficiency is application of thermal engineering. In addition to this, sustainable engineering approaches nowadays are a necessity for improving the efficiency of all of the engineering research areas. For this reason, the ANN model is used to forecast different types of energy efficiency problems in thermodynamic literature. The examined system consists of two main parts such as the ETHP system and the ORC system used for thermal energy production. With this system, it is aimed to evaluate energy and exergy analysis results by the ANN method in the case of integrating the ORC system to ETHP, which is one of the planar collectors suitable for the roofs of the buildings. Within the scope of this study, the exergy efficiency was evaluated on the developed ANN algorithm. The effect rates of parameters such as pressure, temperature and ambient temperature affecting the exergy efficiency of ORC integrated ETHP were calculated. Ambient temperature was found to be the most influential parameter on exergy efficiency. The exergy efficiency of the whole system has been calculated as ~23.39%. The most suitable BPNN architecture for this case study is recurrent networks with dampened feedback (Jordan–Elman nets). The success rate of the developed BPNN model is 95.4%.
Earthquake is one of the natural disasters that has always been of interest to researchers. It seems to be difficult to deal with an earthquake due to its accidental nature and unpredictability. Today, with the expansion of cities and the growth in their population, concerns about the increase in casualties and damages caused by the earthquake have increased. Post-earthquake management is highly dependent on predicting the amount and type of damage in any type of structure. Among these structures, little attention has been paid to infrastructures, including underground and submarine pipelines. Given the importance of these structures, research on the impact of earthquakes on these structures and their forms of damages is essential. It is also very important to predict the disaster management plan of the water supply, sewer, oil, and gas pipeline networks due to the earthquake threat. As it is known, the comprehensive approach to disaster management includes prevention (mitigation), preparedness, response, and recovery stages. This study focuses on investigating possible damages in submarine pipelines after an earthquake and study on mentioned disaster management stages and  provides an overview of the effects of possible earthquakes on submarine pipelines.
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