Application of RELUX simulation to investigate energy saving potential from daylighting in a new educational building in UK

Daylighting is a renewable energy solution for illumination and visual comfort in buildings. Daylighting performance and its induced energy saving largely depends on various factors, including room geometry, window-to-wall ratio, window transmittance, surface reflectance of construction and surrounding obstructers, artificial lighting array, its daylight-related control strategies and so forth. During the last few decades, lighting simulation tools developed quickly to provide researchers and architects a faster and reliable ways to simulate complex lighting environment. The aim of this paper is to deal with a quantitative analysis of annual energy saving potential from daylighting in a real building using various methods. A case study of a newly constructed educational atrium building, Engineering and Science Learning Centre (ESLC) in the University of Nottingham, UK, is presented. Computational analysis using validated lighting simulation tool RELUX will be conducted to simulate the daylighting performance in the selected rooms. Particularly, an economical measurement of window transmittance and interior surface reflectance will be conducted, and the measured results will be input into the simulation software to increase the accuracy of simulation results. The annual energy saving potential in artificial lighting from daylighting is determined by European Standard EN15193 and also estimated using static climate-based Daylight Factor (DF) method and dynamic climate-based Daylight Coefficient (DC) methods

Universal and language-specific predictors of early word reading in a foreign language:An analysis of the skills that underlie reading acquisition in three different orthographies

A central question in the field of foreign language acquisition is whether the processes involved in reading development in a foreign language are universal or dependent on characteristics of the specific language involved. We investigated the impact of orthographic depth and writing system on word reading acquisition in a foreign orthography, by studying children who are proficient readers in the transparent alphabetic Dutch orthography and who learn to read simultaneously in the transparent alphabetic Spanish orthography, the nontransparent alphabetic French orthography and the nonalphabetic Chinese orthography. Results showed that the skills that underlie foreign language word reading are not universal, but are different for alphabetic and nonalphabetic orthographies, and are also different for transparent and nontransparent alphabetic orthographies, albeit to a lesser extent. Word reading acquisition in transparent alphabetic Spanish depended mainly on reading skills in the native language. In contrast, in nontransparent alphabetic French and nonalphabetic Chinese, word reading was mainly influenced by cognitive skills: French word reading by phonological awareness and verbal intelligence, and Chinese word reading by verbal and nonverbal intelligence. Findings thus suggest that the processes underlying foreign language word reading acquisition are not universal but rather depend on the specific language involved

Automatic phonological activation during visual word recognition in bilingual children:a cross-language masked priming study in Grades 3 and 5

International audienc