In order to protect the safety and health of laborers and to achieve the goal of zero occupational accidents at work, the study takes the top three industries with the highest number of laborers inspections from 2010 to 2019, namely, construction, manufacturing, wholesale, and retail as the research object. Using three major indicators of disability injury including Disabling Frequency Rate, Disabling Severity Rate, and Frequency Severity Indicator as parameters, it applies grey theory to establish a GM (1,1) rolling forecast model. It further predicts the trend of disability injuries from 2020 to 2025. Based on the optimized GM (1,1) rolling model, the results show that there has the highest accuracy rate in the prediction of Disabling Frequency Rate (accuracy is 95.235% in K7) in construction. Disabling Severity Rate and Frequency Severity Indicator are both in wholesale and retail industries (accuracy is 97.044% in K6 and accuracy is 99.906% in K5). Therefore, Disabling Severity Rate has an upward trend, which is due to the common type of traffic accidents in the wholesale and retail industry. The study further proposes that relevant actual disaster cases could be the training materials and strengthen the communication in education to improve workers’ safety awareness for occupational disaster prevention.

This paper reports an experience of using three building energy analysis programs- BLAST-3.0, DOE-2.1D and ESP version 7 release 2b. The programs are validated and their results compared for the subtropical climate of Hong Kong. Two occupied buildings have been studied to evaluate the programs; a ten-storey office building and a Polytechnic lecturer's office. The indoor conditions and the energy consumptions of the two buildings were measured. The predicted energy performance is compared with the measured energy consumption for the two buildings. Discrepancies between the simulated results and the measured performance, and likely problems in the application of these programs by practicing engineers, are discussed. The applicability of the three programs is further demonstrated by simulating the energy performance of a hypothetical test building, where the programs' predictions of building load imposed on the air conditioning plant are compared.

Rwanda is an East African Community (EAC) nation with rapid and remarkable past development in different sectors and still with the ambitious targets and plans to be achieved in the coming years ahead. The government plans universal electricity access by 2024 with 52% grid connection and 48% off-grid connections. In the transport sector, the concept of electric vehicles has been initiated and started in order to contribute to the UN Paris agreement and decrease the reliance of the transport sector on gaseous fuels which are one source of air pollutants leading to climate change, premature deaths, and morbidity associated with poor air quality. With higher electricity demand than the generation of the Rwandan power grid, different energy strategies are being developed with the overall objective to achieve the targeted universal energy access. In order to overcome the aforementioned issue, this paper proposes an integration of solar PV microgrids for the satisfaction of electric vehicle (EV) technology in Rwanda. Using HOMER Grid software, a managed EV charging station is simulated to a grid connected solar PV microgrid with storage in order to assess the economic impact. The results show that the proposed technology can lower the levelized cost (LCOE) of electricity by 139.7%. This study can contribute to further research developments in either different perspectives related to the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) with electric vehicles or studies related to affordable and environment-energy systems.

A growing number of manufacturers are realizing cost and environmental benefits through the sustainability of innovation and optimization processes. Based on polluting less and creating less, the study is pursuing sustainability on increasing operational efficiency by reducing costs and waste. Pulse dust collection systems are commonly used filtration equipment in industries and have lots of energy consumption due to running all day. This study is focused on the optimal parameters for energy saving and cost reduction, and the model is represented by the pressure drop of the filter and the residual powder. The characteristic values of the cleaning efficiency and the air permeability reduction are used for MATLAB to analyze the optimization state. This study found that the material of filter elements, the type of dust, the conditions of pulse-jet, and the filtering speed are the factors that affect the operational efficiency. In terms of cost, the pulse interval time in 10 s is the best parameter, and the pulse time does not affect the overall cost of the filter. Considering energy saving, 0.1 s of the pulse time is the best parameter. In addition, a lower dust concentration is a way to improve efficiency for increasing the filter life and reducing cost.

Access to energy is among the key pillars to socioeconomic and improved life style. The East African Community (EAC) countries, also members of sub-Saharan Africa, are among countries with enough energy resources but still struggling with low electricity access, and the lower proportion of citizens with electricity access challenges such as expensive tariff, frequent blackouts, and unreliable service still persists. Diesel technology is among the easy and fast installation technologies for a location with an urgent need of electricity while solar is a clean technology with free fuel. Considering the diversity of electricity tariffs, cost of diesel fuel, and suitability to solar energy exploitation in EAC, this paper intends to provide a technoeconomic analysis for reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy system in the region. A daily load of 94.44 kWh recorded from averaging electricity bills of a luxury house in Kigali, Rwanda, is used as research object, and HOMER simulations are carried on considering the level of such daily load being supplied by either (a) diesel generator, (b) solar + diesel technology, (c) PV + battery storage, or (d) PV + battery   storage + grid system in each member country of the EAC. The results show that (a) solar energy is a feasible and applicable technology for energy generation for the whole six EAC countries; (b) for South Sudan, if it is a standalone system, the diesel technology is less costly than solar technology; however, solar energy can still be recommended to be adopted as it has no gas emissions; (c) except South Sudan, PV + battery storage technology is found to be more affordable and cleaner than any technology including diesel; and (d) the option of connecting PV + battery storage to the grid is found more economical for locations where grid interaction is possible because their levelized electricity costs (LCOE) are lower than the real electricity tariffs currently in use within each of the six EAC countries. The solar energy system with battery storage (both off-grid and grid connected) proposed in this research can lead to an efficient increase of national energy resource exploitation in the EAC countries, resulting in reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy access to all the citizenry of the EAC.