scholarly journals Towards a Living Lab for Enhanced Thermal Comfort and Air Quality: Analyses of Standard Occupancy, Weather Extremes, and COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Ulpiani ◽  
Negin Nazarian ◽  
Fuyu Zhang ◽  
Christopher J. Pettit
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Design Guidelines ◽  
Weather Extremes ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Occupancy Patterns ◽  
Living Lab ◽  
Spatial Coverage ◽  
Educational Buildings ◽  
Extreme Variability

Maintaining indoor environmental (IEQ) quality is a key priority in educational buildings. However, most studies rely on outdoor measurements or evaluate limited spatial coverage and time periods that focus on standard occupancy and environmental conditions which makes it hard to establish causality and resilience limits. To address this, a fine-grained, low-cost, multi-parameter IOT sensor network was deployed to fully depict the spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability of environmental quality in an educational building in Sydney. The building was particularly selected as it represents a multi-use university facility that relies on passive ventilation strategies, and therefore suitable for establishing a living lab for integrating innovative IoT sensing technologies. IEQ analyses focused on 15 months of measurements, spanning standard occupancy of the building as well as the Black Summer bushfires in 2019, and the COVID-19 lockdown. The role of room characteristics, room use, season, weather extremes, and occupancy levels were disclosed via statistical analysis including mutual information analysis of linear and non-linear correlations and used to generate site-specific re-design guidelines. Overall, we found that 1) passive ventilation systems based on manual interventions are most likely associated with sub-optimum environmental quality and extreme variability linked to occupancy patterns, 2) normally closed environments tend to get very unhealthy under periods of extreme pollution and intermittent/protracted disuse, 3) the elevation and floor level in addition to room use were found to be significant conditional variables in determining heat and pollutants accumulation, presumably due to the synergy between local sources and vertical transport mechanisms. Most IEQ inefficiencies and health threats could be likely mitigated by implementing automated controls and smart logics to maintain adequate cross ventilation, prioritizing building airtightness improvement, and appropriate filtration techniques. This study supports the need for continuous and capillary monitoring of different occupied spaces in educational buildings to compensate for less perceivable threats, identify the room for improvement, and move towards healthy and future-proof learning environments.

Crowdsensing in Smart Cities

2019 ◽  
pp. 893-915
Author(s):  
Paolo Bellavista ◽  
Giuseppe Cardone ◽  
Antonio Corradi ◽  
Luca Foschini ◽  
Raffaele Ianniello
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Design Guidelines ◽  
Technical Data ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Living Lab ◽  
Widespread Availability ◽  
One Year ◽  
The University

The widespread availability of smartphones with on-board sensors has recently enabled the possibility of harvesting large quantities of monitoring data in urban areas, thus enabling so-called crowdsensing solutions, which make it possible to achieve very large-scale and fine-grained sensing by exploiting all personal resources and mobile activities in Smart Cities. In fact, the information gathered from people, systems, and things, including both social and technical data, is one of the most valuable resources available to a city's stakeholders, but its huge volume makes its integration and processing, especially in a real-time and scalable manner, very difficult. This chapter presents and discusses currently available crowdsensing and participatory solutions. After presenting the current state-of-the-art crowdsensing management infrastructures, by carefully considering the related and primary design guidelines/choices and implementation issues/opportunities, it provides an in-depth presentation of the related work in the field. Moreover, it presents some novel experimental results collected in the ParticipAct Crowdsensing Living Lab testbed, an ongoing experiment at the University of Bologna that involves 150 students for one year in a very large-scale crowdsensing campaign.

Crowdsensing in Smart Cities

2015 ◽  
pp. 316-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Bellavista ◽  
Giuseppe Cardone ◽  
Antonio Corradi ◽  
Luca Foschini ◽  
Raffaele Ianniello
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Design Guidelines ◽  
Technical Data ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Living Lab ◽  
Widespread Availability ◽  
One Year ◽  
The University

The widespread availability of smartphones with on-board sensors has recently enabled the possibility of harvesting large quantities of monitoring data in urban areas, thus enabling so-called crowdsensing solutions, which make it possible to achieve very large-scale and fine-grained sensing by exploiting all personal resources and mobile activities in Smart Cities. In fact, the information gathered from people, systems, and things, including both social and technical data, is one of the most valuable resources available to a city's stakeholders, but its huge volume makes its integration and processing, especially in a real-time and scalable manner, very difficult. This chapter presents and discusses currently available crowdsensing and participatory solutions. After presenting the current state-of-the-art crowdsensing management infrastructures, by carefully considering the related and primary design guidelines/choices and implementation issues/opportunities, it provides an in-depth presentation of the related work in the field. Moreover, it presents some novel experimental results collected in the ParticipAct Crowdsensing Living Lab testbed, an ongoing experiment at the University of Bologna that involves 150 students for one year in a very large-scale crowdsensing campaign.

scholarly journals A Machine Vision Approach for Bioreactor Foam Sensing

2021 ◽  
pp. 247263032110088
Author(s):  
Jonas Austerjost ◽  
Robert Söldner ◽  
Christoffer Edlund ◽  
Johan Trygg ◽  
David Pollard ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Machine Vision ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
High Accuracy ◽  
Consumer Electronics ◽  
Learning System ◽  
Automotive Applications ◽  
Fine Grained

Machine vision is a powerful technology that has become increasingly popular and accurate during the last decade due to rapid advances in the field of machine learning. The majority of machine vision applications are currently found in consumer electronics, automotive applications, and quality control, yet the potential for bioprocessing applications is tremendous. For instance, detecting and controlling foam emergence is important for all upstream bioprocesses, but the lack of robust foam sensing often leads to batch failures from foam-outs or overaddition of antifoam agents. Here, we report a new low-cost, flexible, and reliable foam sensor concept for bioreactor applications. The concept applies convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a state-of-the-art machine learning system for image processing. The implemented method shows high accuracy for both binary foam detection (foam/no foam) and fine-grained classification of foam levels.

scholarly journals Exploiting Existing Comparators for Fine-Grained Low-Cost Error Detection

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Gulay Yalcin ◽  
Oguz Ergin ◽  
Emrah Islek ◽  
Osman Sabri Unsal ◽  
Adrian Cristal
Keyword(s):  
Error Detection ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Fine Grained

scholarly journals Preliminary Characterization of Three Metallurgical Bauxite Residue Samples

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 66
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Angelopoulos ◽  
Maria Georgiou ◽  
Paschalis Oustadakis ◽  
Maria Taxiarchou ◽  
Hakan Karadağ ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Bauxite Residue ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Morphological Observation ◽  
Critical Metals ◽  
Alumina Production ◽  
Preliminary Characterization ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Extraction And Separation ◽  
Bulk Chemical

Bauxite Metallurgical Residue (BR) is a highly alkaline and very fine-grained by-product of the Bayer process for alumina production. Its huge global annual production has resulted in increasing accumulation of BR, causing deposition problems and serious environmental issues. RM contains oxides and salts of the main elements Fe, Al, Ca, Na, Si, Ti, and rare earths—REEs (Sc, Nd, Y, La, Ce, Ds)—many of which have been categorised by EU as critical metals (CMs). The valorisation of BR as a low-cost secondary raw material and metal resource could be a route for its reduction, introducing the waste into the economic cycle. REEScue constitutes a research project that aims to instigate the efficient exploitation of European bauxite residues, resulting from alumina production from Greece (MYTILINEOS SA), Turkey (ETI Aluminium), and Romania (ALUM SA), containing appreciable concentrations of scandium and REEs, through the development of a number of innovative extraction and separation technologies that can efficiently address the drawbacks of the existing solution. The consortium consists of three alumina producers from Greece (MYTILINEOS SA), Turkey (ETI Aluminium), and Romania (ALUM SA) and two academic partners from Greece (National Technical University of Athens) and Turkey (Necmettin Erbacan University). We present preliminary characterization results of three different BR samples that originate from the three aluminium industries, in respect of bulk chemical analysis (XRF, ICP), mineralogical investigation (XRD), and morphological observation through microscopy.

scholarly journals Time-lapse cross-hole electrical resistivity tomography (CHERT) for monitoring seawater intrusion dynamics in a Mediterranean aquifer

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Palacios ◽  
Juan José Ledo ◽  
Niklas Linde ◽  
Linda Luquot ◽  
Fabian Bellmunt ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Electrical Conductivity ◽  
Electrical Resistivity ◽  
Seawater Intrusion ◽  
Electrical Resistivity Tomography ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Heavy Rain ◽  
Time Lapse ◽  
Resistivity Tomography ◽  
Bulk Electrical Conductivity ◽  
Spatial Coverage

Abstract. Surface electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) is a widely used tool to study seawater intrusion (SWI). It is noninvasive and offers a high spatial coverage at a low cost, but it is strongly affected by decreasing resolution with depth. We conjecture that the use of CHERT (cross-hole ERT) can partly overcome these resolution limitations since the electrodes are placed at depth, which implies that the model resolution does not decrease in the zone of interest. The objective of this study is to evaluate the CHERT for imaging the SWI and monitoring its dynamics at the Argentona site, a well-instrumented field site of a coastal alluvial aquifer located 40 km NE of Barcelona. To do so, we installed permanent electrodes around boreholes attached to the PVC pipes to perform time-lapse monitoring of the SWI on a transect perpendicular to the coastline. After two years of monitoring, we observe variability of SWI at different time scales: (1) natural seasonal variations and aquifer salinization that we attribute to long-term drought and (2) short-term fluctuations due to sea storms or flooding in the nearby stream during heavy rain events. The spatial imaging of bulk electrical conductivity allows us to explain non-trivial salinity profiles in open boreholes (step-wise profiles really reflect the presence of fresh water at depth). By comparing CHERT results with traditional in situ measurements such as electrical conductivity of water samples and bulk electrical conductivity from induction logs, we conclude that CHERT is a reliable and cost-effective imaging tool for monitoring SWI dynamics.

scholarly journals Assessing Indoor Environmental Quality of Educational Buildings Using BIM

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahim Al-Sulaihi ◽  
Khalid Al-Gahtani ◽  
Abdullah Alsugair ◽  
Ibrahim Tijani
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Quality ◽  
Indoor Environmental Quality ◽  
Educational Buildings

High-resolution PM2.5 forecasting using CAMS predictions, low-cost sensors and ensemble techniques

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Areti Pappa ◽  
Ioannis Kioutsioukis
Keyword(s):  
Air Pollution ◽  
Air Quality ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Quality Models ◽  
Ensemble Techniques ◽  
Spatial Coverage ◽  
Comparable Performance ◽  
Lstm Network ◽  
Air Quality Monitoring Stations

<p>Expediting urbanization has triggered an increase in cardiopulmonary diseases attributable to fine-particulate air pollution. Air Quality models simulate the dilution and dispersion of air pollutants that affect the atmosphere, contributing crucially to the comprehension of its processes. Air quality forecasts produced by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) provide open access to accurate and reliable information but in a coarse resolution. Data-driven models can downscale the forecasts from deterministic air quality models on the basis of reliable measurements. Low-cost air quality sensors are widely known for their increased spatial coverage and economic operational costs, but usually, their reliability is in dispute. In this study, a dense network of calibrated PM2.5 measurements installed in the city of Patras is combined with CAMS forecasts and statistical approaches to generate 24h forecasts of PM<sub>2.5 </sub>concentrations in an urban area of Greece. The implemented techniques are the analog ensemble (AnEn) and the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. Auxiliary variables of meteorological origin were also utilized. The required forecasts were retrieved from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and were pin-pointed to the location of the air quality monitoring stations. The results showed that both methods had comparable performance, with low bias and relatively small errors. In the stations with high PM2.5 levels, AnEn performed better, whereas in the stations and seasons with moderate concentrations LSTM outperformed. A comprehensive validation is presented and discussed. AnEn and LSTM methods were proved reliable tools for air pollution forecasting and can be used for other regions with small modifications.</p>

Design Guidelines for Doubler Plate Repairs of Ship Structures

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pradeep K. Sensharma ◽  
Malcolm Willis ◽  
Aaron Dinovitzer ◽  
Nat Nappi
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Design Guidelines ◽  
Performance Data ◽  
Ship Structures ◽  
Buckling Strength ◽  
Relative Ease ◽  
Fatigue And Fracture ◽  
Fracture Assessment ◽  
Design Guidance

The use of doubler plates or ‘doublers’ has become routine for temporary ship repairs. It is the preferred method for ships’ structural repairs for plate corrosion due to its relative ease and low cost of installation over the more costly permanent welded plate insert repair. A lack of performance data and engineering design guidance are the reasons that repairs with doublers are currently considered only temporary. This objective of this study was to develop a set of guidelines for designing and applying doubler plate repairs to ship structures. The guidelines were established using the following criteria: various stress analyses, buckling strength, corrosion types and rates, weld types, and doubler plate fatigue and fracture assessment. Studying and understanding doubler plate repair performance by comparison to that of the primary hull performance allows critical operational decisions to be made with greater ease and confidence. However, the ultimate goal of this study was to establish the design and limitations on the applications of doubler plate repairs for surface ships.

Low-Water Stream Crossings: The Iowa Experience

2003 ◽  
Vol 1819 (1) ◽  
pp. 355-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Gu ◽  
T. J. McDonald ◽  
R. A. Lohnes
Keyword(s):  
Material Selection ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Geographic Region ◽  
Design Guidelines ◽  
Warning Signs ◽  
Water Stream ◽  
Safe Alternative ◽  
Low Volume Roads ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Selection Of

Replacement of old, unsafe bridges on low-volume roads is an increasing concern in rural America. Counties and local jurisdictions with inadequate bridges on secondary roads are faced with large capital expenditures for replacement structures or possible road closings. Low-water stream crossings (LWSCs) can provide a low-cost and reasonably safe alternative. Three types of LWSC are unvented fords, vented fords, and low-water bridges. A study was conducted to develop design guidelines for all three types of LWSC. Although the study focused on Iowa, the results are thought to be applicable to a wider geographic region. The salient features of this design process, including site selection, selection of most effective LWSC type, and geometric and material selection design, are described for the three types of structures. Although potential legal liability associated with LWSCs is a concern, the Iowa experience indicates that, with adequate warning signs, accidents and subsequent tort claims may actually be less with LWSCs than with deficient and obsolete bridges. On the basis of this history, it appears that potential liability from the use of prudently designed LWSCs is not a high risk. However, each state and local agency should thoroughly study code and local ordinance restrictions when considering LWSC options.

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