Structural Retrofitting of Old Illyria Hote

Illyria hotel （formerly Bozhur） was built during the sixties in the heart of the actual Kosovo＇s capital Prishtina, according to former old Yugoslav standards in a Modernist architectural style. It represents a massive structural system with brick walls up to 54 cm thick and ＂avramenko＂ type reinforced concrete floors. The investor＇s aim was to add another two floors on the top of the existing ones and to build two level underground parking floors, a health spa centre, whilst at the vicinity of the existing building （the northern side） to erect a new 17 story-high brand new hotel and administration building. The retrofitting of the structure as well as construction of the new structure has been done in full accordance with the new structural Eurocodes＇ recommendations. 3D FEM （finite element method） modeling was used for the analysis and design, using ETABS v 9.5 nonlinear and ARSAP 2010 （Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis Professional 2010）. Response spectrum design according to EC 8,3.2.2.4 has been used for seismic analysis and design with a reference peak ground acceleration on type A ground Of AgR = 0.25 g.     

An extremely well isolated 2D-antiferromagnetic layer

An exceptionally well isolated 2D-square quantum antiferromagnet has been prepared. Layers of Cu(II) ions bridged by pyrazine molecules form the layers which are separated by more than 12 Å due to ancillary organic ligands and counter ions. Magnetic data show that the interlayer coupling is less than 0.05% of the intralayer exchange strength (~ 8 K).     

An Embedded Solar‐Powered Irrigation System Based on a Cascaded Fuzzy Logic Controller

This study examines the automatization of irrigation tasks of solar photovoltaic water pumping systems (SPVWPS) in greenhouse applications. A prototype of an embedded control system has been developed for SPVWPS battery‐coupled architectures. The new design aims at improving the safety of solar irrigation facility by avoiding the exhaustion of pumping resources (water and energy) while watering. The availabilities of pumping resources are introduced as new requisite inputs of a fuzzy logic‐based control system (FLC) so that it can produce adequate and safe irrigation durations. The FLC design consists of two cascaded devices. The first device uses climate data to estimate durations for watering that satisfy crop needs. The second device uses actual resource levels to evaluate the pumping capacity of the SPVWPS regarding requested durations. Watering is performed whenever the pumping capacity of the system represents more than 25% of the total requirement. Test results from an experimental greenhouse prove the effectiveness of the decision‐making mechanism that prevents scheduling unsuccessful watering tasks.     

Online comprehensive two-dimensional characterization of puff-by-puff resolved cigarette smoke by hyphenation of fast gas chromatography to single-photon ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry: quantification of hazardous volatile organic compounds

This work presents the direct coupling of a custom-made smoking machine (SM) to fast gas chromatography combined with single-photon ionization mass spectrometry (GC × SPI-MS) utilizing a six-port, two-position valve for online puff-resolved comprehensive two-dimensional investigation of cigarette smoke. The innovative electron-beam pumped rare gas excimer light source (EBEL) filled with argon provided vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) photons of 9.8 ± 0.4 eV (126 ± 9 nm) for SPI. Puff-by-puff quantification of 14 hazardous volatile organic smoke constituents from the 2R4F Kentucky research cigarette was enabled for two smoking regimes, i.e., ISO and Canadian Intense, after determination of photoionization cross sections. The investigated analytes comprised NO, acetaldehyde, butadiene, acrolein, propanal, acetone, isoprene, furan, crotonaldehyde, isobutanal, butanal, 2-butanone, benzene, and toluene. The determined amounts of these compounds in cigarette smoke agreed excellently with the literature values. Furthermore, the two well-known patterns of puff-by-puff behaviors for these different smoke constituents were obtained for both whole smoke and gas-phase measurements.