Development of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics for Simulation of Flow and Contaminant Transport on Natural Urban Terrain and Streams

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method is proposed, as an alternative mesh-free approach to model all components of rainfall, surface runoff, fluid flow and contaminant transport with the representation of contaminant and fluid, as particles. By doing so, contaminant particles can be traced for the motion within runoff or fluid flow, even in the form of minute concentration which is difficult to render in conventional Eulerian grid methods. Weakly compressible SPH (WCSPH) is selected with cubic spline kernel, and the incorporation of Large Eddy Simulation (LES) representing turbulence effect. Various SPH diffusion formulations have been reviewed and selected. The selected SPH formulation for contaminant concentration is validated against analytical diffusion equation with boundary conditions of solid wall or free surface. The validated method is applied to calculate the overland flow and the contaminant transport on a model terrain and a real terrain geometry. The real terrain is a part of the city of Teluk Intan in Perak, Malaysia and is simulated using digital elevation model (DEM) data retrieved from Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Global Water Body Dataset (ASTWBD) for ground elevation and channel surface.

Urban Ensembles: An integrated approach to design in steep, urban landscapes

<p>Urban Ensembles explores the way in which landscape and architecture can be employed together within the design of a steep, urban site. Lyttelton is a small port town on the border of Christchurch, settled in the foothills of a harbour formed by a major volcanic eruption. This rugged setting, with steeply sloping urban terrain, presents an interesting challenge when designing an urban development. The site was badly damaged in a series of earthquakes in 2010-2011, and many of the town’s oldest buildings, heritage structures dating back to the colonial settlement era, were destroyed. This has left a void in the heart of Lyttelton, and caused the loss of much of the tourism business that the town relies upon for its income. This thesis takes a methodological approach to the design of landscape architecture on such a challenging site. A range of techniques are explored, drawing from both landscape and architecture to explore the roles that each discipline plays in the design of urban spaces. The frequent imbalance between disciplines is addressed both through the literature review and design method, as this landscape architecture thesis draws on architectural design as a tool for generating spaces which fall somewhere in between the two ideals of interior and exterior. The final design proposal is an alternative rebuild plan for the central business area to the south of London St, and also addresses the relationships between that site and the surrounding context, both urban and environmental. The aim of this design is to create a series of interconnected spaces which have a strong relationship to the surrounding harbour setting, and also to facilitate development of the pedestrian spaces throughout the block and encouraging the development of activity at the street level, through the interface between buildings and landscape.</p>

Urban Ensembles: An integrated approach to design in steep, urban landscapes

<p>Urban Ensembles explores the way in which landscape and architecture can be employed together within the design of a steep, urban site. Lyttelton is a small port town on the border of Christchurch, settled in the foothills of a harbour formed by a major volcanic eruption. This rugged setting, with steeply sloping urban terrain, presents an interesting challenge when designing an urban development. The site was badly damaged in a series of earthquakes in 2010-2011, and many of the town’s oldest buildings, heritage structures dating back to the colonial settlement era, were destroyed. This has left a void in the heart of Lyttelton, and caused the loss of much of the tourism business that the town relies upon for its income. This thesis takes a methodological approach to the design of landscape architecture on such a challenging site. A range of techniques are explored, drawing from both landscape and architecture to explore the roles that each discipline plays in the design of urban spaces. The frequent imbalance between disciplines is addressed both through the literature review and design method, as this landscape architecture thesis draws on architectural design as a tool for generating spaces which fall somewhere in between the two ideals of interior and exterior. The final design proposal is an alternative rebuild plan for the central business area to the south of London St, and also addresses the relationships between that site and the surrounding context, both urban and environmental. The aim of this design is to create a series of interconnected spaces which have a strong relationship to the surrounding harbour setting, and also to facilitate development of the pedestrian spaces throughout the block and encouraging the development of activity at the street level, through the interface between buildings and landscape.</p>

The Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong

Diaspora transformed the urban terrain of colonial societies, creating polyglot worlds out of neighborhoods, workplaces, recreational clubs and public spheres. It was within these spaces that communities reimagined and reshaped their public identities vis-à-vis emerging government policies and perceptions from other communities. Through a century of Macanese activities in British Hong Kong, this book explores how mixed-race diasporic communities survived within unequal, racialized and biased systems beyond the colonizer-colonized dichotomy. Originating from Portuguese Macau yet living outside the control of the empire, the Macanese freely associated with more than one identity and pledged allegiance to multiple communal, political and civic affiliations. They drew on colorful imaginations of the Portuguese and British empires in responding to a spectrum of changes encompassing Macau’s woes, Hong Kong’s injustice, Portugal’s political transitions, global developments in print culture and the rise of new nationalisms during the inter-war period.

CFD analysis of a Darrieus Vertical-Axis Wind turbine installation on the rooftop of a buildings under turbulent inflow conditions

The behavior of a rooftop mounted generic H-rotor Darrieus vertical axis wind turbine (H-VAWT) is investigated numerically in realistic urban terrain. The interaction of the atmospheric boundary layer with the different buildings, topography, and vegetation present in the urban environment leads to the highly turbulent inflow conditions with continuously changing inclination, and direction. Consequently, all these factors can influence the performance of a VAWT significantly. In order to simulate a small H-VAWT at rooftop locations in the urban terrain under turbulent inflow conditions, a computational approach is developed. First, the flow field in the terrain is initialized and computed with inflow turbulence. Later, the wind turbine grids are superimposed for further computation in the turbulent flow field. The behavior of the H-VAWT is complex due to the 3D unsteady aerodynamics resulting from continuously changing the angle of attack, blade wake interaction, and dynamic stall. To get more insights into the behavior of a rooftop mounted H-VAWT in turbulent flow, high fidelity DDES simulations are performed at different rooftop positions and compared the results against the behavior at uniform inflow conditions in the absence of inflow turbulence, built environment. It is found that the performance of wind turbine is significantly increased near the rooftop positions. The skewed flow at the rooftop location increases the complexity. However, this effect contributes positively to increasing the performance of wind turbines.

The Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong

Diaspora transformed the urban terrain of colonial societies, creating polyglot worlds out of neighborhoods, workplaces, recreational clubs and public spheres. It was within these spaces that communities reimagined and reshaped their public identities vis-à-vis emerging government policies and perceptions from other communities. Through a century of Macanese activities in British Hong Kong, this book explores how mixed-race diasporic communities survived within unequal, racialized and biased systems beyond the colonizer-colonized dichotomy. Originating from Portuguese Macau yet living outside the control of the empire, the Macanese freely associated with more than one identity and pledged allegiance to multiple communal, political and civic affiliations. They drew on colorful imaginations of the Portuguese and British empires in responding to a spectrum of changes encompassing Macau’s woes, Hong Kong’s injustice, Portugal’s political transitions, global developments in print culture and the rise of new nationalisms during the inter-war period.

Urban Warfare

Urban warfare refers to combat occurring in a built environment of some significant size. It is sometimes referred to as Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) or as Fighting in Built Up Areas (FIBUA). It is widely considered to be particularly challenging. Partly this is because of the inherent complexity of the built environment, which taxes the ability of commanders to apprehend the battlespace, to lead their own forces effectively, and to judge the location and intent of enemy forces accurately. Partly it is because of the presence of civilians and sensitive civilian infrastructure (i.e., places of worship, hospitals, museums, etc.) in the battlespace, which limits the choice of tactics and weapons available to commanders for fear of violating laws of armed conflict. Partly it is because cities are nodes in global networks of trade and communications, as a result of which the consequences of tactical decisions may propagate widely and quickly to significant strategic effect. Sun Tzu advised fighting in cities only if “absolutely necessary, as a last resort,” a rule to which statesmen and commanders have tried to adhere to this day. However, on account of long-term trends in demographics, urbanization, and connectedness the major armed forces of the world have been preoccupied with a postulated unavoidability of urban warfare. Military doctrines and strategies often now start from the assumption that the future of land operations will increasingly be centered on urban terrain. The literature on urban warfare is quite segmented by discipline, normative outlook, particular areas of concern, and some fundamental points of disagreement. Researchers in urban studies detect in the growing military focus on operating in cities a “new military urbanism” that is by nature neo-colonialist, xenophobic, and “anti-urban.” The job of activist scholarship, in this view, is to expose and confront this development. In war and strategic studies, by contrast, scholars are interested in solving the challenges of urban warfare, including through the use of theories derived from disciplines like urban studies, anthropology, geography, and informatics. There is a further division between analysts who see urban warfare as an essentially modern phenomenon whose meaningful history stretches not much further back than the Second World War, and those who see war and the city as interlinked with relevant lessons going back as far as the origins of both.

The Telemetry Control System on Omni wheel Enemy Infiltrator Robot Based on Internet of Things (IoT)

The development of sophisticated technology in the era of the industrial revolution 4.0, namely the collaboration between automation technology and the internet, causing changes in the combat and reconnaissance model to be remotely. The internet of things based omni wheel robot is divided into three module units, the main module, the data processing module, and the drive module. This concept uses a telemetry control system that is integrated with computers and the internet for data processing. The omni wheel robot is used in urban terrain for autonomous mobile surveillance operations and webcam monitoring via a web server. The omni wheel robot is designed to use four omni wheel controls and a trajectory as the main autonomous drive for the robot, the raspberry pi 3 is a microcontroller for processing programs on the robot and the webcam is used to take pictures of the terrain the robot passes through. All controls on the omni wheel robot use a telemetry system by using Wi-Fi internet network access remotely to minimize losses for TNI soldiers’ personnel in carrying out reconnaissance tasks.