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| SCIENCE TRIBUNE | Thursday, June 15, 2000, Chandigarh, India |
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Space tech to fight forest fires Buildings of tomorrow Cybersurfing with Amar Chandel |
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Space tech to fight forest fires DEVASTATING forest fires, which engulf thousands of hectares of dense forest stretches in various parts of India with a frightening frequency, are a naturally occurring phenomenon that is difficult to control through conventional means. As such, many novel tools and innovative techniques are being adopted to fight the forest blazes. In recent years, advances in space technology have turned out to be a positive development in the ongoing fight against forest fires. For instance, recently, the 15-nation European Space Agency (ESA) joined the fight against forest fires in British Colombia, Canada, during the summer of 2000, a demonstration of REMSAT (Real Time Emergency Management via Satellite), a project initiated and funded by the ESA, showed how the integrated use of three key space technologies could help bring a forest fire under control. REMSAT was put through its paces close to the small town of Squamish deep in the heart of British Columbia’s forests. A scripted scenario of events based on a real fire was acted out to test precisely how useful the system would be to fire fighters. “Managing a forest fire is very complex”, says Emmanuel Rammos, REMSAT project manager. “Many different branches of the emergency services are involved and they need plans and intelligence. REMSAT is useful before, during and after a fire — before for gathering information, during for helping fire fighters’ manage the situation and after for assessing the damage”. ESA under its applications programme, placed a contract for REMSAT with MacDonald Dettwiler (British Columbia, Canada), a company with extensive expertise in space based operations and in transportable equipment, who teamed with the British Columbia Forest Service (BCFS). The demonstration in Squamish was the first of two involving a scripted sequence of events resembling a real fire. Within its applications programmes, ESA developed new, practical use for space technologies. “The application of space technology has huge development potential” says Rammos, “Demonstration projects such as REMSAT bridge the gap between space technologies and users”. The intention is to develop REMSAT into a generic system that could be used anywhere in the world to manage the response to any major incident, such as earthquakes, floods, fires or release of hazardous materials. The REMSAT project has already attracted attention from countries around the world, including China, Thailand, Argentina and several European countries. REMSAT integrates the use of telecommunications, earth observation and navigation satellites to provide a valuable tool for the forest fire fighting services”. The British Columbia Forest Services works hard to maintain its reputation as a world leader in forest fire prevention and suppression”, say John Glangan, fire operations specialist with the forest service. “Managing resources in an area of over one million square kilometres, its crew confront an average of 2800 wildfires each year, about half of them caused by lightning and half caused by humans”. “The major difficulty with fighting a forest fire is lack of communication and information”, says Stanely Wu, REMSAT project manager at MacDonald Dettwiler. “The incident commander needs to know instantly where his people and suppliers are. REMSAT will provide communications and information independently of terrestrial and cellular systems”. The fight against a forest fire takes place at three levels” from the headquarters, from a mobile command centre set up near the fire and from fire fighters on the ground. With REMSAT, the position of all the fighters and all resources and equipment is determined by navigation satellites and relayed automatically via telecommunications satellites to the Intermediate Mobile Terminal (IMT) at the mobile command centre and the Control Centre Terminal (CCT). “In the past, fire fighters relied on conventional radio transmission. But during a big fire, the radio can get jammed. The messages they’re sending are often for an extra length of hose, pump or bulldozer. These types of message could be sent by data communication so that the radio frequencies can be reserved for higher priority communications”, says Wu. In very remote areas, conventional radio may not be available and satellite communications may be the only option. The intermediate mobile terminal receives a message instantaneously together with the precise location of the person sending it. The nearest supplies can be located easily from the navigation satellite data. The data messaging system also makes it easier to send messages from the intermediate mobile terminal to the fire fighters, for example, about a weather report of change in wind direction. |
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Buildings of tomorrow THE catchword for the new millennium is to take steps for mitigating global warming and R&D efforts are directed towards building energy-sufficient houses, which would reduce carbon dioxide emission. The design of the houses is aimed at having a building which is solar passive and incorporates photovoltaics to produce electricity needed for the house inhabitants. Solar passive buildings are designed to collect energy from the sun to provide heating and lighting within the building and to reject solar energy when it could lead to overheating. Photovoltaic(PV) panels are used as building material in the building to produce electricity which serves as a back-up power, to meet energy needs of the dwellers. But PV designers have to meet not only the aesthetic requirements of the building, but also the economic criteria imposed by climate and location. In some cases the PV designers use surfaces different from the optimal one, while at other locations the surfaces may be divided into two or more differently oriented sub-sections. In such cases, it may not be easy to predict the energy behaviour of such surfaces and also the sizing of invertors becomes difficult. The ultimate aim is to have a house which would be self-sufficient in meting the energy needs and also to meet requirements of water by tapping rainfall. HERBEMAN HOUSE, Sendai (Japan) aimed to provide harmony between ‘man’ and ‘nature’ and was built during 1996. The house incorporates a highly advanced solar system with solar, thermal and sky radiation cooling, underground coolers, photovoltaic electricity generation and rain-water collection arrangement. This results in unique energy independent house. Average solar energy received at the location where the house is located was measured on a horizontal surface during the month of January, to be 7900KJ/m2. day. The house has been under constant evaluation since September, 1996.The annual variations in the underground main tank, heating/cooling/domestic hot water demands, collected and emitted heat by the solar collector and sky radiator, are measured. It has been found that the house could meet almost its entire energy demands, including space heating and cooling, domestic hot water, through electricity generated by the PV set-up incorporated into the building. The house operates in two modes: i) thermal energy storage mode extending from September to March and ii) cool storage mode extending from April to August. The system has been designed to utilise as little energy as possible, to collect and to emit the heat. The primary energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission from the house was found to be one tenth of those from a conventional Japanese house in the same locality. Though in India we may not reach the stage as attained by Japan, but simpler designs are being experimented upon. A solar hut was built at Almora (altitude 1650 m) and its performance monitored with regard to temperature and relative humidity inside the hut. The minimum outdoor temperature was also recorded and also the global solar radiation (on a horizontal surface) were recorded using thermo-electronic pyranograph . The graph was obtained to get hourly, daily and monthly values of solar radiations. It was found that the minimum temperature in the solar hut (without any auxiliary heating ) was 13.7° c which provided a comfortable level for buildings at Almora. The additional advantage of this hut over the conventional structure was that vegetables could be grown inside the hut. It was concluded that such glass houses provided with passive solar heating could provide economical and comfortable living space and can help solve problem of space heating and thus reduce Co 2 emission. Such huts can solve the problem of vegetable availability for high altitude locations. |
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Cybersurfing with Amar Chandel IF you are a regular computer user, files of various sizes and shapes must be cluttering your hard disc. The resultant slowing down of the processor is a perennial problem. You can shift some of them to floppies but then begins the problem of keeping track of them. In any case, it is not possible to access the files when you are away from the computer. Such files are best stored in virtual space, which can be had free from several websites. The more dependable of the lot is www.idrive.com which offers you 25 Mb of space. The files that you store there can be accessed wherever in the world you happen to be. The one problem is that the possibility of somebody else snooping on your documents is always there. As you know, hackers can get into most "secure" places. But at least those files which have nothing to hide — those downloaded from the Internet, for instance — can always go into the virtual space. The facility is best used for large MP3 files. But it seems many sites have jumped on the bandwagon without enough preparation. For instance, www.xdrive.com offers as much as 100 Mb of space but it causes all sorts of problems with your regular drives when you try to use it. So, one word of advice is not to erase the files from the C-drive when you transfer these to such virtual drives. At least not till you are sure that all bugs have been removed. *** So you think you have a very high IQ? Surely you would like to test it in competition with the best in the world. Mensa is the organisation for you. It comprises the 100,000 specially gifted top 2 per cent of the best brains with phenomenal IQs. Go to www.mensa.org/workout.html and try the 30 problems they throw at you. Officially these have to be
completed in 30 minutes but they give you more time, considering the cluttered Internet lines. But even with all the time at your disposal, the test is such a tough nut to crack. At least yours truly came out with non-flying colours. *** The name Hrithik Roshan is red-hot not only in the real world. In the virtual world also, his personal website, www.hrithikroshan.com, receives so much of traffic that it almost burns up telephone lines. If you are lucky to log in, you get to savour his personal details and also hear songs and see his videos. If you are wondering why it has no advertisements, you should know that a businessman has offered to purchase the entire space for a phenomenal sum before which even the contract that he signed with Coca Cola pales into insignificance.
Jo bhi chaho wo ho jaye? |
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New products & discoveries AN intelligent artificial hand developed in England is believed to be the most sophisticated in the world. The complex technology used in the prosthetic hand enables it to grasp and handle objects more efficiently than any other device available. It was devised by Dr Peter Kyberd, at Southampton University, southern England, who now heads the research team of the Oxford Orthopaedic Engineering Centre (OOEC) in southern England. The Oxford intelligent Hand has two fingers and a thumb. Unlike a conventional prosthetic hand, which opens and closes like a
claw, it is able to grasp objects in a more natural manner. Weighing half a kilogram it can be operated by tensing two muscles in the user’s forearm where two electrodes — one for each muscle — read the
finy electrical signals, which are amplified and fed into a series of circuits, prompting the fingers to curl up. The hand can pick things up between two or three fingers or clasp on object in a fist. The hand has the ability to detect how hard or gentle a force is needed to hold objects. This is made possible by each finger tip containing a finy microphone that detects vibrations caused by a slipping object while eliminating other unrelated noises. This reflex can be switched off with a twitch of a muscle if a delicate object such as a child’s hand is grasped. (Spectrum) Gel that heals better A gel that helps heal wounds with minimal scarring and has potential use in wound management in burns and surgery has been prepared by Indian researchers. Due to its better wound healing properties, the gel may be useful in prevention of post-surgical adhesions, cosmetic surgery and treatment of burns, the researchers said. The gel is a combination of synthetic polymer and a substance found commonly in insects and shells of crustaceans like prawns and crabs. A team from the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS) in Pune produced the gel using chitosan which is derived from chitin found in insects and crustaceans, and a polymer polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP).aChitosan, which can be absorbed easily by the body and is compatible with it, is often used in wound dressings and promotes healing. |
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Science Quiz 1. This German physical chemist was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry but he also remained Director of the Institute of Experimental Physics at Berlin. He put forward the Third Law of Thermodynamics. Name this great scientist who also demonstrated in the early twentieth century as to how radio transmission takes place. 2. Because of gradual thinning of the atmosphere, the pressure of air goes on decreasing with height. This causes expansion of air and results in its cooling. That is way air in the hills is cooler than that in the plains. What is this type of cooling called? 3. This junction between two neurons or between a nerve cell and a muscle acts as a valve for one way transmission of impulses. What is this connection called which behaves like an electrical resistance? 4. Name the mode of transmission of heat in which particles of a fluid medium absorb heat from the source by turn in circulation. 5. This number measures the quality of petrol and is assigned on the basis of the knocking performance of a sample of petrol as compared to that of a standard fuel mixture. What is this number called? 6. In general, this term represents the connection between one piece of information and the other. In particular, it is a highlighted word or image on the website which connects us to another site. Which term is this? 7. When a body is stressed, the strain produced in it is a function of this stress. On removing the stress, the strain does not follow the previous path but lags behind the stress. what is this effect called? 8. What is the basic science of study of preventive and social medicine called which deals with the frequency, causes, transmission, prevention, control and treatment of diseases, and the application of this study to control health problems? 9. This chemical compound is used as a drug and sold under the trade name antifebrin. It lowers body temperature and relieves headache. Which is this compound? 10. Who invented zerox machine (photocopier) which is now found in almost every nook and corner of India? Answers 1. Walther Hermann Nernst 2. Adiabatic cooling 3. Synapse 4. Convection 5. Octane number 6. Hyperlink 7. Elastic hysteresis 8. Epidemiology 9. Acetanilide 10. US physicist Chester Floyd Carlson in 1938. |
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