Development of New Sustainable Urban Areas: Horizontal or Vertical Planning Systems for Resource Efficient Cities

China’s remarkable economic growth has been partly driven by a high rate of urbanization and fast reduction of poverty. This has not been achieved without a price, that of environmental pollution. The Chinese government has made great efforts to reduce coal consumption; however, adjusting the fuel mix in a country like China is not easy. An important question is, if developing countries should follow the Chinese model and reduce poverty based on the Chinese vertical planning system with a strong one-party government? or should the developing countries use a horizontal model based more on local democratic principles? The transition to more sustainable energy systems will be gradual and may take longer time than expected. Sustainable development is a process involving conflicts between different aspects of sustainability and it is a value-based concept, which means that a participatory process involving key actors including the public is crucial for the development. The Chinese vertical model is compelling for many developing countries because it produces fast results on a massive scale. A horizontal planning system is slower but more resilient and adaptive concerning complexity of the urban fabric. In a new project, based more on horizontal principles, a Swedish planning support system, CITYLAB, is now being tested in a Chinese context

A Post-Processing Automation Tool for Finite Element Analysis on Airplane Fuselage

The work in this project revolves around investigating how automation can be used to improve the post-processing efficiency and quality when analyzing and sizing an airplane structure. The project is carried out at Heart Aerospace, based in Gothenburg, Sweden who is currently working on the design of an electric 30-seater regional aircraft for short travel called the ES-30, whose main engines are powered by batteries. A program called ”H-ADAPT” (Heart Aerospace Design Analysis & Post-processing Tool), which serves as a tool with a graphical user interface, was created and used to perform the necessary analytical strength and stability analysis for the stringers and skins of the airplane fuselage. The program imports the large data files generated in the finite element analysis and summarize the different load cases, checks margin of safety and suggests optimized geometries for the elements. The user can edit the geometrical and material parameters of the elements, save and load the progress, as well as export the results to an Excel table for documentation. Validation of the analytical solutions is performed through hand-calculations, as well as comparison against a finite element analysis, for certain elements. Unfortunately, the global finite element model lacked some geometrical information, and the user must manually give this input to the program for every element. This disrupts the automation and is time-consuming, which was one of the main purposes of the program to optimize. However, in the future if the geometrical information has been added, the program provides useful analysis and an easy-to-use graphical user interface to help with the sizing of the elements. It was also created in such a way that more complex analysis can be added, as well as more parts of the airplane

Building a GPS Receiver for Space Lessons Learned

Over the past 4 years the Component Systems and Hardware branch at NASA GSFC has pursued an inhouse effort to build a unique space-flight GPS receiver. This effort has resulted in the Navigator GPS receiver. Navigator's first flight opportunity will come with the STS-125 HST-SM4 mission in August 2008. This paper covers the overall hardware design for the receiver and the difficulties encountered during the transition from the breadboard design to the final flight hardware design. Among the different lessons learned, the paper stresses the importance of selecting and verifying parts that are appropriate for space applications, as well as what happens when these parts are not accurately characterized by their datasheets. Additionally, the paper discusses what analysis needs to be performed when deciding system frequencies and filters. The presentation also covers how to prepare for thermal vacuum testing, and problems that may arise during vibration testing. It also contains what criteria should be considered when determining which portions of a design to create in-house, and which portions to license from a third party. Finally, the paper shows techniques which have proven to be extraordinarily helpful in debugging and analysis

Application of a Metabolic Thinking Driven Sustainability Framework in Early-Stage Planning of Eco-City

The fast urbanization rate together with increasing global population and consumption is challenging the long-term sustainability of our social systems and supporting ecosystems on earth. The signs of instability can be seen in environmental degradation, e.g., climate change and loss of biodiversity. Also, the increasing use of materials and energy creates competition and international conflicts. The success of international agreements to handle the global problems has been limited. This is because deeply entrenched economic and political interests are involved. Political leaders are locked up to promises of economic growth and increasing welfare. Through globalization, resources and products are transported long distances and it is becoming hard to distinguish between local and global effects. This makes people feel that the overall situation is so complicated, so they cannot affect it. Bringing things closer to people will create more awareness and can create enormous opportunities for new ideas and business to solve the existing problems. The United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals are focused on reducing poverty in the world. China has succeeded in reducing poverty on a massive scale through fast economic growth but to the price of increased use of virgin resources and environmental degradation. It seems more and more urgent to develop support models for urban development on a local scale focusing on urban metabolism. As sustainable development involves many normative decisions, participatory planning and cross-sectoral planning will be needed to ensure that conflicts between goals can be resolved. The Swedish Green Building Council has, together with more than one thousand actors, developed a recent model for the support of sustainable urban planning called CITYLAB. This has been used in a case study in the city of Changzhou in China. The case study reveals several barriers in Chinese planning when it comes to implementing more of horizontal planning practices

Rapport for «Metoden i språkovergang: fase 2».

Fase 2: Monologen har blitt transkribert til seks ulike dialekter av språkbrukere som har talemålene som sitt førstespråk