The reality of living in passive solar homes: A user-experience study

This paper presents a study of a user-experience survey about living in passive solar homes. It was carried out at the Energy Park located in the western part of Milton Keynes. The survey focuses on the reality of living in passive solar homes as perceived or experienced by the occupant. It is hoped that the findings would come to bear on strategic passive solar design decisions that would address the improvement of the well-being of the occupant.. The survey is aimed at assessing user satisfaction with the overall performance of their homes as well as a study of some of the problems that are believed to be common in passive solar housing.Results from the survey seem to indicate that the majority of those who buy passive solar homes are motivated to do so by a desire for thermal comfort at low cost. The building aesthetics is the second most important factor, showing that passive solar home lovers are also conscious of the quality of the architectural design. The overall performance of passive solar homes in this study, with regard to thermal and visual comfort, seems to be generally satisfactory. Statistical analysis showed some significant association between some important environmental design parameters.     

Influence of maternal bodyweight on size, conformation and survival of newborn lambs

Although body condition score was not significantly different between light (<55 kg, n = 6) and heavy (> or =60 kg, n = 7) ewes at mating, it declined between Day 30 and Day 90 of gestation in light but not heavy ewes, and remained lower up to term. All ewes bore twins, delivered near term (Days 144-146) by Caesarean section. One lamb was immediately placed into a warm (30 degrees C; WD) and its twin into a cool (15 degrees C; CD) ambient temperature, and tissues were sampled at 0.5 h or 6 h. All CD lambs born to light ewes exhibited hypothermia and/or respiratory failure and did not survive longer than 30 min; these symptoms were not observed in their WD twins or any lamb born to heavy ewes. Total lamb birth weight, placental weight and fetal cotyledonary weight were lower with light than with heavy ewes. Lambs born to light ewes had less perirenal adipose tissue and smaller liver, heart, kidneys, brain, adrenals and thyroid, although their heart, brain and pancreas represented a larger proportion of total bodyweight; pancreas weight was similar to that in lambs born to heavy ewes. Hence, maternal bodyweight critically influences placental weight and lamb size and survival after birth.     

Optical loss of photovoltaic modules under diffuse light

The optical behaviour of photovoltaic (PV) modules from different fabrication technologies was investigated under diffuse light by a novel characterization method. The optical apparatus, hemispherical/hemispherical reflectometer, allows both reflectance and transmittance measurements under an incident diffuse light which simulates the distributed outdoor irradiation from the sky or from the albedo. This paper presents only the configuration for reflectance measurements. The apparatus is provided with a single integrating sphere of 40 cm diameter, which acts as a lambertian source of diffuse light and spontaneously collects the diffuse light reflected by the sample in the front hemisphere. The hemispherical/hemispherical reflectance, R^hh, expresses the optical loss of the PV device under diffuse light, and is obtained by measurements of light irradiance inside the sphere in correspondence with the sample and with a selected number of standards of diffuse reflectance. The best optical performances, in terms of optical loss, were achieved by modules realized with blue mono-Si cells and having textured front surfaces in the cover sheets.     

A mutual assessment of the uncertainties of digital elevation models using the triple collocation technique

This study investigates the uncertainties of digital elevation models (DEMs) using the triple collocation (TC) method. DEMs from satellite missions are important for many geoscience disciplines and for economic benefits and are freely available. Validating DEMs is necessary to select an appropriate model for a given region and application. Provided certain assumptions about the error structure of any three data sets – measuring the same phenomenon – can be made, the TC approach can be used to provide an unbiased and scaled estimate of the error variances of the data sets, without requiring a reference data. We compared the TC approach to the traditional approach of using a reference data set using the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission version 4.1 (SRTM v4.1) DEM, ASTER (the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) GDEM (Global DEM) version 2, the 1 arc-minute global relief model (ETOPO1), a DEM compiled by the Survey and Mapping Division of Ghana (SMD DEM), and 545 ground control stations (GCSs). The error estimates for the DEMs via TC were considerably smaller than those obtained from the reference-based approach. As an example, the best performing DEM (SRTM v4.1) recorded a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 15.601 m using the GCSs as reference, while its TC-derived accuracy was 6.517 m. We note that based on the results of the TC, the estimated error of the GCSs is approximately 14 m. Using a data set with an error of 14 m to validate other data sets is certainly bound to result in unfavorable results. Thus, we have demonstrated in this work that the TC approach is able to provide an unbiased error of DEMs. The approach is important even for regions where GCSs are highly accurate, but more so for regions with low-quality GCSs.     

A Comparison of the Quality of Low Pour Fuel Oils (LPFO) Blended From Nigerian and Foreign Crude Oils

Light gas oil (LGO) and long residue (LRS) fractions used to prepare the LPFO blends were collected from two Nigerian refineries and similar products were obtained from Venezuela (foreign crudes). The physicochemical properties of the blends were determined using the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) methods and other analytical techniques.Comparison of the results with the ASTM standard values indicates that the Nigerian blends are of higher quality than the foreign blends. For instance, the mean value of vanadium was 400% higher in the foreign blend and the Nigerian crude has low sulfur levels. Thus, the regulatory agencies in Nigeria should enforce the specification laws to ensure that crudes imported do not impact negative effects on the industry and around the globe.     

Periwinkle shell: Based granular activated carbon for treatment of chemical oxygen demand (COD) in industrial wastewater

The present investigation was undertaken to compare the adsorption efficiency of a low cost adsorbent, periwinkle shell—based granular activated carbon (PSC) with the adsorption efficiency of the commercial activated carbon (CAC) and a ratio 1:1 mixture of PSC and CAC (PSC/CAC) with respect to uptake of the organic components responsible for the chemical oxygen demand (COD) of industrial wastewater. The influence of treatment time, adsorbent dose, pH of the media, agitation speed and adsorbent particle size on the rate of percent COD removal is evaluated. PSC has shown quite effective adsorbent capacity for COD removal with 77.5% efficiency. Though its capacity is slightly lower than that of CAC with 79% efficiency, however the low material cost makes it an attractive option for the treatment of COD. The equilibrium adsorption study can be described by the Linear, Langmuir and Freundlich models. The mechanisms of the rate of adsorption of COD were analysed using the Elovich equation and a pseudo‐second‐order model. The models provided a very high degree of correlation of the experimental adsorption rate data suggesting either model could be used in design applications.     

Hidden Markov model for human to computer interaction: a study on human hand gesture recognition

Human hand recognition plays an important role in a wide range of applications ranging from sign language translators, gesture recognition, augmented reality, surveillance and medical image processing to various Human Computer Interaction (HCI) domains. Human hand is a complex articulated object consisting of many connected parts and joints. Therefore, for applications that involve HCI one can find many challenges to establish a system with high detection and recognition accuracy for hand posture and/or gesture. Hand posture is defined as a static hand configuration without any movement involved. Meanwhile, hand gesture is a sequence of hand postures connected by continuous motions. During the past decades, many approaches have been presented for hand posture and/or gesture recognition. In this paper, we provide a survey on approaches which are based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) for hand posture and gesture recognition for HCI applications.     

Power system security enhancement by OPF with phase shifter

This paper presents an integrated optimal power flow (OPF) with phase shifter approach to enhance power system security. The general OPF calculations are hourly based and the control variables of OPF are continuous. However, the calculations of phase shifter are daily based, and the variables related to phase shifter are discrete. Therefore, the general OPF cannot be directly used to solve this problem. The paper develops the rule-based OPF with phase shifter scheme to bridge the problems. In order to effectively alleviate the line overloads, the ranking of phase shifter locations is conducted based on contingency analysis and sensitivity analysis. The best phase shifter sites are identified and selected into a rule-based system accordingly. The handshaking procedure between the adjustment of the selected phase shifters and OPF calculation is proposed using a rule-based method. The hourly-based OPF problem is solved by the extended quadratic interior point method. The IEEE 30-bus system is used to test the proposed scheme     

Intermittent Fasting Primes the Tumor Microenvironment and Improves Nanomedicine Delivery in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Fasting has many health benefits, including reduced chemotherapy toxicity and improved efficacy. It is unclear how fasting affects the tumor microenvironment (TME) and tumor-targeted drug delivery. Here the effects of intermittent (IF) and short-term (STF) fasting are investigated on tumor growth, TME composition, and liposome delivery in allogeneic hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) mouse models. To this end, mice are inoculated either subcutaneously or intrahepatically with Hep-55.1C cells and subjected to IF for 24 d or to STF for 1 d. IF but not STF significantly slows down tumor growth. IF increases tumor vascularization and decreases collagen density, resulting in improved liposome delivery. In vitro, fasting furthermore promotes the tumor cell uptake of liposomes. These results demonstrate that IF shapes the TME in HCC towards enhanced drug delivery. Finally, when combining IF with liposomal doxorubicin treatment, the antitumor efficacy of nanochemotherapy is found to be increased, while systemic side effects are reduced. Altogether, these findings exemplify that the beneficial effects of fasting on anticancer therapy outcomes go beyond modulating metabolism at the molecular level.