Embodied and Operational Energy Consumption in the City

This study shows how estimates of energy consumption can be extracted from existing data sets and efficiently related to characteristics of the real property making up the discrete areas of the city. The study suggests that embodied energy consumption may be more significant than previously thought and suggests how estimates of embodied and operational energy may be used as a development control tool in the planning system.     

Zero Loss Considerations in Digital Class 5 Office

This paper describes the investigation performed to select impedance matching networks required to support zero loss digital end office switching. Subjective test results showed that 8 dB of sing margin is sufficient to prevent the introduction of additional degradations over the range of echo path delays associated with digital Class 5 switching. Analysis of loop data shows that balance networks of 700ω paralleled by a 0.05 μF capacitor for non-loaded loops and 1400 ω for loaded loops will give sufficient return losses to provide the 8 dB of sing margin. In addition, these networks will give significant improvement in echo performance on DDD calls.     

Building the Connection Between Housing Needs and Metropolitan Planning in Sydney,Australia

The theme of a more compact city has been a central feature of planning policy for Sydney's development over the last two decades. Urban consolidation, in the form of attached dwellings in medium- and high-density configurations, has become the predominant form of new residential development since the early 1990s. One of the largely untested claims for this policy is that it provides more housing choice for an increasingly diverse population and that simply building larger amounts of smaller housing in high-density concentrations will be sufficient to meet that demand. As a result, planning for higher density housing has been undertaken with little explicit recognition of the housing sub-markets higher density housing caters for or their specific spatial characteristics within the city. These issues are examined by an analysis of the socio-economic characteristics of areas with high concentrations of attached housing. These data are processed by factor analysis to identify and locate the range of sub-markets within attached housing and additional small area data used to fill out the market profiling. The results reveal that a range of specific housing needs are met by this form of housing with discriminative characteristics in certain locations. In other words, higher density housing is associated with a range of locationally specific and spatially distinctive sub-markets. These findings are particularly relevant and timely as a new metropolitan strategy is in preparation for Sydney where an estimated 60–70 per cent of new dwelling provision in the next 30 years will take place within existing suburbs through higher density redevelopment. Planning for such development must take into account the local markets for such accommodation which have very different characteristics in different parts of the city.     

Classification of jet fuel properties by near-infrared spectroscopy using fuzzy rule-building expert systems and support vector machines

Monitoring the changes of jet fuel physical properties is important because fuel used in high-performance aircraft must meet rigorous specifications. Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is a fast method to characterize fuels. Because of the complexity of NIR spectral data, chemometric techniques are used to extract relevant information from spectral data to accurately classify physical properties of complex fuel samples. In this work, discrimination of fuel types and classification of flash point, freezing point, boiling point (10%, v/v), boiling point (50%, v/v), and boiling point (90%, v/v) of jet fuels (JP-5, JP-8, Jet A, and Jet A1) were investigated. Each physical property was divided into three classes, low, medium, and high ranges, using two evaluations with different class boundary definitions. The class boundaries function as the threshold to alarm when the fuel properties change. Optimal partial least squares discriminant analysis (oPLS-DA), fuzzy rule-building expert system (FuRES), and support vector machines (SVM) were used to build the calibration models between the NIR spectra and classes of physical property of jet fuels. OPLS-DA, FuRES, and SVM were compared with respect to prediction accuracy. The validation of the calibration model was conducted by applying bootstrap Latin partition (BLP), which gives a measure of precision. Prediction accuracy of 97 ± 2% of the flash point, 94 ± 2% of freezing point, 99 ± 1% of the boiling point (10%, v/v), 98 ± 2% of the boiling point (50%, v/v), and 96 ± 1% of the boiling point (90%, v/v) were obtained by FuRES in one boundaries definition. Both FuRES and SVM obtained statistically better prediction accuracy over those obtained by oPLS-DA. The results indicate that combined with chemometric classifiers NIR spectroscopy could be a fast method to monitor the changes of jet fuel physical properties.