No abstract

Information on airconditioning and ventilation has been continuously disseminated in response to the Japanese Government's announcement of the need for appropriate ventilation measures against the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), and the issuing of an emergency presidential discourse by the presidents of Engineering Societies. In this paper, we add to the information the latest knowledge on the behavior of SARS-CoV-2 in air, describe its diffusion characteristics in the built environment, and summarize the effects of temperature and humidity on the virus. Then we recommend varying approaches of airconditioning control for facility type.

Curie-point pyrolysis/GC and /GC/MS analyses were carried out for 14 coal model aromatic compounds with longer alkyl side chains or polymethylene bridges. It was found that (i) pyrolytic products reflected quantitatively constituents of original model compounds (though thermal decomposition in these systems is complicated with several secondary reactions), (ii) a series of 1-alkenes was obtained as major aliphatic products from the pyrolysis of the model compounds having longer alkyl side chain, while Curie-point pyrolysis of some coals or their extracts afforded a series of n-alkanes as major products along with minor amounts of 1-alkenes, and (iii) model compounds such as more condensed aromatic compounds or the aromatic compounds having oxygen functional groups afforded n-alkanes preferentially along with 1-alkenes. On the basis of the results obtained in this paper, we tried to correlate Curie-point pyrolytic products of extracts from Illinois No. 6 coal with its supposed organic chemical structure.

In order to measure the liquid water content of a melting snowflake, a new automatic instrument based on a filter paper technique has been developed and used for field observation of sleet.Analysis of the observational data indicated that the relationship between the liquid water content w and the mass of the snowflake m (mg) could be expressed as W=/3m-a. and f range from 0.27 to 0.95 (0.53 in an average) and 0.07 to 0.51 (0.25 in an average), respectively.A simple model for the melting of snowflakes showed that a was a parameter depending on the fall velocity of the snowflake alone and parameter 3 depends on the quantity of heat transferred from ambient air to the snowflake and the density of the ice skeleton in the melting snowflake as well as the fall velocity.

We have developed an energy-saving operations system featuring remote operation of central monitoring equipment installed in a building. This system applies robotic process automation to remote operation to automatically perform energy-saving operations on behalf of the operations manager. Furthermore, as another feature, the system requires only a local area network to connect to the central monitoring equipment enabling automatic operation to be performed regardless of the specifications of the central monitoring equipment. The items targeted for energy-saving operation by this system are the optimal operation of a heat source system, setting of the supply water temperature of heat source equipment, setting of room temperature, and setting of outside-air intake volume. At present, the operations manager has the role of performing these energy-saving operations, but finding the optimal value for each of these operations is a difficult task. An operations manager, moreover, is responsible for tasks other than facility operations such as maintenance management, so changing optimal settings accurately at regular intervals on an ongoing basis can be quite a burden. This system uses robotic process automation technology, so it is capable of performing all energy-saving operations that can be executed by the central monitoring equipment. We installed this system in a large-scale shopping mall and performed energy-saving operations on outside-air processing units. In this trial, we achieved a 44% reduction in the amount of energy required for outside-air processing and a 47% reduction in CO2 emissions.