Energy efficiency for reducing carbon footprint in historic buildings: Comparing case in the UK and Malaysia

Climate changes seem to be one of the controversial conflicts for people in today's world and reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which are one of the main reasons for climate changes, will be an appropriate solution for this alien. Buildings are one of the main resources for producing carbon dioxide emissions. For instance, around 40 percent of all carbon dioxide emission in the UK comes from buildings and so buildings especially heritage buildings need to improve their performance to contribute carbon reduction. The main aim of this research is to identify some acceptable and convenient ways for reducing carbon dioxide emissions in heritage buildings for controlling climate changes to some extent. In this paper, a desktop study was conducted to review the techniques and technologies to help us for reducing carbon dioxide emissions in heritage buildings. In this paper, the importance of heritage buildings and their elements such as wall, roof, window, door, floor has discussed and the main reasons for increasing energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions have mentioned. In continuing, principles, risks, materials, methods, techniques and technologies for controlling energy loss of historic building elements have expressed. The results indicate that manufactured and transport of building materials will produce a large amount of carbon emissions and so the continued use of historic and heritage buildings can be an accommodative solution for this issue. For instance, in England in 2000 these processes accounted for more than 10 percent of the UK carbon dioxide emissions. It proves that conservation of heritage buildings is important not only for significant value of these buildings, but also for reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. All the methods, techniques and technologies which have discussed in this paper are correspondent solution for the goal of reduction carbon dioxide emissions that produce through the life-cycle of historic buildings

Effect of the short-term temperature changes on Diagnostic Indicator in online insulation monitoring by parametric identification

International audienceElectrical generators of offshore wind or tidal current turbines are exposed to harsh marine and operating conditions. Predictive maintenance is therefore a key issue for the competitiveness of these energy generation systems. Generally speaking, the predictive maintenance is based on the monitoring of a Diagnostic Indicator (DI): the interpretation of its value or drift is used for the optimal planning of the corrective maintenance. In this work, we present briefly our new online monitoring technique of electrical machine winding insulation. This model-based approach consists in monitoring the drift of a DI built from the in-situ estimation of high-frequency electrical model parameters. The involved model structures are derived from the RLC network modeling of the winding insulation, with more or less lumped parameters. In the second part of the work, we investigate the effects of temperature changes on the estimated parameters of diagnostic models. A 1.5 kW low power wound stator is exposed to different temperature levels, from 30°C to 160°C, and for each temperature a series of experimental acquisitions is realized. Identification results show that resistance and inductance of a simple HF model structure are almost independent of temperature changes, while insulation capacitance increases with temperature increases: at 160°C it is 8% higher than its initial value at room temperature

Virtual Reality of Fantasy Travel Utopia

Virtual reality can be considered as one of the most influential technologies of the human future. Architecture as human life container is the most important platform for this technology. In order to understand outlook of virtual reality in architecture it is necessary to get familiar with this technology and its evolution. Many years ago, intervention of virtuality and reality was an impossible dream in the human mind. But when Jason Lanier, American scientist, announced realization of this dream, a new horizon was opened to the human. Although this technology initially was regarded mostly as fun and computer games, over the time, the virtual reality technology has become one of the controversial issues in art and science world. At first, non-immersive virtual reality came to existence and despite of evolution in human special imaginations, created challenges for the human in 3D world. However, after a while, immersive virtual reality made it possible to experience every spatial imagination foe the human. Architecture science was no exception in experiencing changes due to close relationship with special imaginations. Meanwhile, possibility of confronting the space designed in human scale, possibility for movement in the designed space as well as possibility for observing changes in different scales with lowest costs were changes in architecture world. But what which can fundamentally change future of architecture is combination of virtual reality and augmented reality, which allows the full integration of virtuality and reality

Virtual Reality of Fantasy Travel Utopia

Virtual reality can be considered as one of the most influential technologies of the human future. Architecture as human life container is the most important platform for this technology. In order to understand outlook of virtual reality in architecture it is necessary to get familiar with this technology and its evolution. Many years ago, intervention of virtuality and reality was an impossible dream in the human mind. But when Jason Lanier, American scientist, announced realization of this dream, a new horizon was opened to the human. Although this technology initially was regarded mostly as fun and computer games, over the time, the virtual reality technology has become one of the controversial issues in art and science world. At first, non-immersive virtual reality came to existence and despite of evolution in human special imaginations, created challenges for the human in 3D world. However, after a while, immersive virtual reality made it possible to experience every spatial imagination foe the human. Architecture science was no exception in experiencing changes due to close relationship with special imaginations. Meanwhile, possibility of confronting the space designed in human scale, possibility for movement in the designed space as well as possibility for observing changes in different scales with lowest costs were changes in architecture world. But what which can fundamentally change future of architecture is combination of virtual reality and augmented reality, which allows the full integration of virtuality and reality

A mathematical description of fossilisation

Fossils constitute an inestimable archive of past life on Earth. However, the stochastic processes, driving decay and fossilisation and overwhelmingly distorting this archive, are challenging to interpret. Consequently, concepts of exceptional or poor preservation are often subjective or arbitrarily defined. Here, we offer an alternative way to think about fossilisation. We propose a mathematical description of decay and fossilisation relying on the change in the relative frequency and characteristics of biogenic objects (e.g., atoms, functional groups, molecules, body parts, organisms) within an organism–fossil system. This description partitions taphonomic changes into three categories: gain, loss, and alteration of state. Although the changes undergone by organisms through decay, preservation and alteration are varying a lot for different organisms under different conditions, we provide a unified formalism which can be applied directly in the comparison of different assemblages, experiments, and fossils. Our expression is closely related to George R. Price’s famous equation for the change of evolutionary traits and can be adapted to the study of palaeontological systems and many others.<br/