Condition assessment surveys

HARRIS-2 is a compact vehicle, developed by TRL for the Highways Agency, capable of carrying out pavement condition assessment surveys at traffic speed over the full range of conditions encountered on the network. 

A second major component of life-cycle asset management is systematic condition assessment surveys (CAS). The objective of CAS is to provide comprehensive information about the condition of an asset... 

Geotechnical surveys are often executed without sufficient detailed scientific research. Sometimes also the pipeline design and the condition assessment for construction are rather insufficient. 

A procedure for performing a site assessment survey using a Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Team (SCAT) has been documented in the literature, including a number of SCAT Manuals for different areas of Canada published by Environment Canada. The SCAT concept was developed during the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. It is a systematic and comprehensive method of data collection that can be used to evaluate shoreline oil conditions if a spill occurs and assist cleanup personnel to develop and plan response actions. The SCAT team usually includes an oil-spill geomorphologist, an ecologist, and an archeologist or land-use specialist. 

Assess. Survey the culture to determine prevailing attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to safety and the environment by way of confidential questionnaires (perception survey), interviews (independent review process), focus group meetings, and visits to assess workplace conditions and possible contributions to incidents [4]. We will cover this in more detail in Chapter 17. 

Existing conditions What is the existing spatial, civil, structural and access conditions within the facility Typically, the following data should either be accessed from existing records and design requirements defined by the support function assessment or acquired by new site survey/investigations ... 

Complete data collection should be carried out weekly. Since changes in the unit are continuous, regular surveys permit distinction among the effects of feedstock, catalyst, and operating conditions. An accurate assessment of a cat cracker operation requires reliable plant data. A reasonable weight balance should have a 98% to 102% closure. 

The assessment stage requires a breakdown of all the costs involved in running the plant, i.e. not only all fuels, but also the costs of operation, maintenance and spares. At this stage it maybe helpful to fit separate electricity meters to sections of the plant under survey, so as to identify their individual fuel costs. Many of the overall expenses will be mixed, but an effort must be made to apportion these to the areas under examination. At the same time, the running conditions and methods are noted. 

The subject has been very thoroughly reviewed [1-3], but certain fundamental aspects can profitably be reconsidered in the light of some recent developments [4-6]. Certainly the most startling of these is the discovery that under conventional conditions the polymerisation of styrene by perchloric and other acids, and by the syncatalytic system stannic chloride-water, is not an ionic process. These polymerisations have been named pseudocationic . This finding is in direct contradiction to the beliefs held previously about this and related reactions. Hence a new survey of the whole field has become necessary which must start with an enumeration of those systems for which the nature of the polymerisation reaction has been established with reasonable certainty. From these boreholes one can then try to assess the nature of the intervening territory and to decide where further detailed exploration would be most profitable. 

To define the problem or problems, then you need to know exactly what s going on with health conditions in the workplace. In other words, you need to make a formal assessment of the health status of the workplace. You ve done the preliminary work as described in Chapter 13. You ve examined the records and the statistics you ve established the prevalence and causes of absenteeism you ve inventoried the workplace chemicals you ve talked with everybody who might have something helpful to say. Now is the time to bring all of this information together and apply it to the shop floor. One of the best ways to do this is to conduct what is called a walk-through survey. 

In assessment of optimal incubation conditions it is advisable, as is frequently done in work with less costly substrates, to measure the activities as a function of the parameter considered at two time points along the velocity-time curves. A survey of available techniques for assaying conjugated bilirubin (Section 4) shows that the possibilities of miniaturization, e.g., by reducing the total volumes of the incubations mixtures without changing the relative concentrations of their components, have seldom been exploited. 

Accuracy is the distance of a measured or estimated value to its true value. Inaccuracies (systematic deviations or bias) may arise from inadequate survey design and processing of the samples. Expert judgment is needed to assess the accuracy however, that implies that the origin and the extraction of the data is described (sampling design and conditions). 

The present chapter deals exclusively with the scientific issues of point (2). It is based on the results of an extensive study under the authority of the Swiss Agency for Environment, Forests and Landscape (SAEFL/BUWAL Perret et al. 2000,2002). The in-depth survey was performed on 23 HT materials originating from 16 different advanced thermal treatment facilities developed by 10 different companies in Switzerland, Germany, France, and Italy, and operated under realistic conditions (e.g., from wastes representative of average MSW). On the basis of the results, two options are tested to assess the long-term behaviour of HT materials ... 

Surveys can still be useful since they integrate the outcome of all the factors along the entire supply chain to test predictions and assess whether models are taking the relevant factors into account, as well as generating new hypotheses when this is not the case. However, if done as isolated studies, the results of food quality surveys obtained at the point of sale have very little predictive power, unless extensive additional data are collected (e.g. origin, variety/breed, storage extent, conditions). Often this is not possible. 

Standards and method statements envisage geotechnical survey performance only in the pre-construction period that leads to insufficient forecasting of the geotechnical conditions for the main pipeline construction in mountainous areas. Therefore accurate quality assessment of the survey is excluded which is crucial for the mitigation of adequate environmental risks in the design and development phase. 

VOCs found in water-based paints in the Netherlands and Denmark (by a survey of manufacturers) are presented in Table 16.3. VOC emission assessments have shown that most of these VOCs are emitted from water-based paints, though with significant variation from product to product in type and quantity of VOC emitted. For example, Table 16.4 presents the VOC emissions from wet products under identical test conditions (Brown, 2000). WBP1 has no 1,2-propylene glycol while the other paints all use large quantities, apparently replacing the glycol ethers and esters. 

Gilliam, R.J., M.W. Alley, and M.E. Gurtz (1995). Design of the National Water-Quality Assessment Program Occurrence and Distribution of Water-Quality Conditions. US Geological Survey Circular 112 33 pp. 

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