Optimization of Casting Process Parameters for Homogeneous Aggregate Distribution in Self-Compacting Concrete: A Feasibility Study

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Spangenberg, Jon; Tutum, Cem Celal; Hattel, Jesper Henri

2011-01-01

The use of self-compacting concrete (SCC) as a construction material has been getting more attention from the industry. Its application area varies from standard structural elements in bridges and skyscrapers to modern architecture having geometrical challenges. However, heterogeneities induced...

Meediakunsti "olümpiamängud"

Index Scriptorium Estoniae

2000-01-01

7.-10. XII toimus Pariisis X rahvusvaheline elektroonilise kunsti sümpoosion "Révélation". Eestist esinesid Raivo Kelomees CD-ROM-projektidega "tokyocity.ee" ja "Videoweaver", Tiia Johannson netiprojektiga "Skyscraper.net". Mare Tralla esines Iliyana Nedkova koostööprojekti "Virtual Revolutions" raames.

Shanghai:A Better City for Better Life

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

2010-01-01

@@ In addition to its modernization, Shanghai's multicultural flair endows Shanghai with a unique glamour. Here, one finds the perfect blend of cultures, the modern and the traditional, and the western and the oriental. New skyscrapers and old Shikumen lanes together draw the skyline of Shanghai.

The Making of the Copy-cat City

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ooi, Can-Seng

2014-01-01

, these observers experience aspects of Chicago, Copenhagen or Canberra when they visit Shanghai. They see the efficient Pudong International Airport, the clean effective subway system, the numerous shopping malls along Huaihai Road, the towering skyscrapers, the creative districts of M50 and Red Town...

2009 USCG Innovation Expo

Science.gov (United States)

2009-11-19

Inspired Building A termite mound can seem eerily like a skyscraper, especially when you consider the mount’s efficient regulation of air flow...cricket that uses its burrow to amplify sound. New Klipsch speakers are created by studying how Egyptian mole crickets amplify sounds Slide # 19 Termite

A Survey of Wall Climbing Robots: Recent Advances and Challenges

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shunsuke Nansai

2016-07-01

Full Text Available In recent decades, skyscrapers, as represented by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Shanghai Tower in Shanghai, have been built due to the improvements of construction technologies. Even in such newfangled skyscrapers, the façades are generally cleaned by humans. Wall climbing robots, which are capable of climbing up vertical surfaces, ceilings and roofs, are expected to replace the manual workforce in façade cleaning works, which is both hazardous and laborious work. Such tasks require these robotic platforms to possess high levels of adaptability and flexibility. This paper presents a detailed review of wall climbing robots categorizing them into six distinct classes based on the adhesive mechanism that they use. This paper concludes by expanding beyond adhesive mechanisms by discussing a set of desirable design attributes of an ideal glass façade cleaning robot towards facilitating targeted future research with clear technical goals and well-defined design trade-off boundaries.

ENERGY STAR and Green Buildings--Using ENERGY STAR Resources for Green Building Rating Systems: LEED[R], Green Globes[R] and CHPS

Science.gov (United States)

Utebay, Kudret

2011-01-01

Every building, from the smallest school to the tallest skyscraper, uses energy. This energy is most often generated by burning fossil fuels, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change. Existing commercial buildings offer a significant opportunity for low-cost, immediate emissions and energy cost…

Author! Author! Seymour Simon: Science Writer Extraordinaire

Science.gov (United States)

Brodie, Carolyn S.

2005-01-01

This column presents a brief biography of author Seymour Simon, whose topics for children's photo essays include icebergs, gorillas, thunderstorms, optical illusions, snakes, air, water, planets, airplanes, volcanoes, cars, the brain, bridges, bugs, crocodiles, skyscrapers, sharks, and paper airplanes. Though he is best known in the style and an…

Welding Technician

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, Ken

2009-01-01

About 95% of all manufactured goods in this country are welded or joined in some way. These welded products range in nature from bicycle handlebars and skyscrapers to bridges and race cars. The author discusses what students need to know about careers for welding technicians--wages, responsibilities, skills needed, career advancement…

JPRS Report, Soviet Union, International Affairs.

Science.gov (United States)

1987-06-25

and in the almost still oily-black water we could see the twinkling lights from the skyscraper hotels built after the proclamation of "infitah...Heliopolis can boast green squares and brilliant store windows and boutiques Paris style. But Heliopolis is not all Cairo. Not far from the citadel raised

ICT in building construction: prospects and challenges in developing ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

For century, humans have created structures but the American wonder which is technology, made what seems impossible possible. The traditional adobe buildings with thatched roof and mud block have been developed to the modern skyscraper. Today, a house can be built with insulation and can be inflated or deflated to ...

Shanghai : literary imaginings of a city in transformation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Scheen, Lena Maria

2012-01-01

Shanghai is a city in flux. In recent years, workers and machines have frantically destroyed large parts of the city to build a new one. But the mental maps and personal memories of its citizens are not as easily erased. Hence a skyscraper designed to meet the growing demand for office property may

Things to Say: Future Applications of Smart Objects in Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Preis, Kevin

2008-01-01

Smart object technology allows users to know something in real time about the physical objects in their presence. Each object, from cereal boxes to skyscrapers, becomes a source of information with which users can interact. Through a series of usage scenarios, the article explores the potential impact of smart objects on learning in formal and…

Optimal Height Of Land Development – An Economic Perspective

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Żelazowski Konrad

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Sky-scrapers are rising in the panorama of big modern cities more and more often, becoming a symbol of dynamic growth and prestige. High-rise development appears to be an answer to the expanding demand for new residential and commercial space as urban land prices continue to go up and the availability of land decreases.

Block Building for Children: Making Buildings of the World with the Ultimate Construction Toy.

Science.gov (United States)

Walker, Lester

This book presents a series of projects for children of all levels of expertise, beginning with abstract patterns, rows, and towers and progressing to step-by-step instructions for 18 projects, including a bridge, boat dock, airport, shopping mall, skyscraper, castle, Greek temple, Toy Store City, City of the Future, and The Emerald City of Oz.…

Warm and Cool Cityscapes

Science.gov (United States)

Jubelirer, Shelly

2012-01-01

Painting cityscapes is a great way to teach first-grade students about warm and cool colors. Before the painting begins, the author and her class have an in-depth discussion about big cities and what types of buildings or structures that might be seen in them. They talk about large apartment and condo buildings, skyscrapers, art museums,…

Essays in technology adoption and corporate finance

OpenAIRE

Patel, Pratish

2013-01-01

This dissertation consists of three chapters that concern technology adoption and corporate finance. The first chapter analyzes the optimal investment strategy of two firms confronted with the option to adopt a new technology. The second chapter analyzes the link between debt maturity and term spread. The third chapter analyzes the role of debt financing on skyscraper heights.

Modern building envelope. Autentic optics. Emporio Tower, Hamburg; Moderne Gebaeudehuelle. Authentische Optik. Emporio Tower, Hamburg

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Anon.

2012-10-15

The former Unilever skyscraper in Hamburg (Federal Republic of Germany) was retrofitted completely. Due to a regulatory submission, the original image of this architectural landmark from the early 1960ies with the new facade should be retrofitted authentically. This submission was fulfilled by means of an highly energetic efficient ''compact double facade''.

ECOSUSTAINABLE HIGH-RISE : The Environmentally Conscious Architecture of Skyscraper

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jimmy Priatman

2000-01-01

Full Text Available The term " green architecture " is related to evolving architecture which is sensitive to the environment and emerges from the environmental awareness due to the effects of destruction of air, water, energy and earth. It is characterized by improving energy efficiency, sustainability concept and holistic approach of the entire building enterprise, where all of the environmental factors are regarded as an objective. Although there are many of environmentally conscious architectural works today, but most of the building designers prefer to deal primarily with small-scale buildings (low to medium rise and often only in greenfield, rural or suburban sites. All those large scale, high-rise or tall buildings located in dense urban areas are regarded as avoidable objects that consumes a lot of energy, uses huge amounts of materials, and produces massive volumes of waste discharge into the environment. These intensive buildings deserve greater attention and should be designed by greater part of our expertise and effort to ecologically design than the smaller buildings with fewer problems. The paper discusses "green" dimensions applied to tall buildings/high-rise buildings with their innovative approach that leads to ecosustainable tall buildings.

Beijing Time

OpenAIRE

Dutton, Michael; Lo, Hsiu-ju Stacy; Wu, Dong Dong

2010-01-01

“Where is the market?” inquires the tourist one dark, chilly morning. “Follow the ghosts,” responds the taxi driver, indicating a shadowy parade of overloaded tricycles. “It’s not called the ghost market for nothing!” And indeed, Beijing is nothing if not haunted. Among the soaring skyscrapers, choking exhaust fumes, nonstop traffic jams, and towering monuments, one discovers old Beijing—newly styled, perhaps, but no less present and powerful than in its ancient incarnation. Beijing Time cond...

Hydroponics or soilless culture

Science.gov (United States)

Chapman, H. D.

1963-01-01

Historically, hydroponics is not a new field; plant physiologists have known and used it for some 100 years. Inevitably, some enthusiasts got carried away.Claims were made of enormous potential yields; skyscraper tops were said to be capable of producing enough food for all of their occupants; and closets, basements, garages, etc. were wishfully converted into fields for hydroponic culture. Numerous publications on the subject appeared during this period. Basic requirements for hydropinc techniques are given along with examples of where soilless culture has been used commercially.

An Automatic System for Elevator Monitoring

OpenAIRE

Md. Haidar Sharif; Ibrahim Furkan Ince

2015-01-01

An elevator is a conveyor device or transport equipment that moves people or goods between floors or levels or decks of a building, vessel, or other structures. It has become a part and parcel of modern life in developed countries. The number of floors in high buildings, skyscrapers, and towers generate the usage of elevators. If it is simply assumed that each floor has at least two elevators in a thirty-floor building, people call the elevators in each floor even they are already occupied in...

The science of structural engineering

CERN Document Server

Heyman, Jacques

1999-01-01

Structures cannot be created without engineering theory, and design rules have existed from the earliest times for building Greek temples, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals - and later, for steel skyscrapers and the frames for aircraft. This book is, however, not concerned with the description of historical feats, but with the way the structural engineer sets about his business. Galileo, in the seventeenth century, was the first to introduce recognizably modern science into the calculation of structures; he determined the breaking strength of beams. In the eighteenth century engineers move

Environmental Performance

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lindelof, Anja Mølle; Schmidt, Ulrik; Svabo, Connie

2017-01-01

Do ants and grasshoppers perform? Do clouds, plants and melting ice? Do skyscrapers, traffic jams and computer vira? And what happens to our understanding of liveness if that is the case? This chapter takes ongoing theoretical disputes about the nature of live performance in performance studies...... as its starting point to investigate liveness within a specific kind of contemporary performance: ‘environmental performances’. Environmental performances are arts practices that take environmental processes as their focus by framing activities of non-human performers such as clouds, wind and weeds - key...

From the skyscraper to the ground-scraper. Rem Koolhaas’s Japanese Kasbah

OpenAIRE

Álvarez Arce, Raquel

2016-01-01

Rem Koolhaas, as a contemporary architect, draws from the proposals which were devel-oped by the architects who reacted to the ideas formulated on the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, like the Team 10 members. Woods, along with Candilis and Josic, worked out a new type of building that he called ground-scrapper, although it is better known by the name given by Alison Smithson: the mat-building. Rem Koolhaas, in the Nexus World building in Fukuoka, propose, as he says in S,M,L,...

Generating explanations via analogical comparison.

Science.gov (United States)

Hoyos, Christian; Gentner, Dedre

2017-10-01

Generating explanations can be highly effective in promoting learning in both adults and children. Our interest is in the mechanisms that underlie this effect and in whether and how they operate in early learning. In adult reasoning, explanation may call on many subprocesses-including comparison, counterfactual reasoning, and reasoning by exclusion; but it is unlikely that all these processes are available to young children. We propose that one process that may serve both children and adults is comparison. In this study, we asked whether children would use the results of a comparison experience when asked to explain why a model skyscraper was stable. We focused on a challenging principle-that diagonal cross-bracing lends stability to physical structures (Gentner et al., Cognitive Science, 40, 224-240, 2016). Six-year-olds either received no training or interacted with model skyscrapers in one of three different conditions, designed to vary in their potential to invite and support comparison. In the Single Model condition, children interacted with a single braced model. In the comparison conditions (Low Alignability and High Alignability), children compared braced and unbraced models. Following experience with the models, children were asked to explain why the braced model was stable. They then received two transfer tasks. We found that children who received highly alignable pairs were most likely to (a) produce brace-based explanations and (b) transfer the brace principle to a dissimilar context. This provides evidence that children can benefit from analogical comparison in generating explanations and also suggests limitations on this ability.

Software essentials design and construction

CERN Document Server

Dingle, Adair

2014-01-01

About the Cover: Although capacity may be a problem for a doghouse, other requirements are usually minimal. Unlike skyscrapers, doghouses are simple units. They do not require plumbing, electricity, fire alarms, elevators, or ventilation systems, and they do not need to be built to code or pass inspections. The range of complexity in software design is similar. Given available software tools and libraries-many of which are free-hobbyists can build small or short-lived computer apps. Yet, design for software longevity, security, and efficiency can be intricate-as is the design of large-scale sy

Physics understanding the properties of matter and energy

CERN Document Server

2015-01-01

Without physics, modern life would not exist. Instead of electric light, we would read by the light of candles. We couldn''t build skyscrapers. We could not possibly bridge rivers, much less build a jet or interplanetary craft. Computers and smartphones would be unimaginable. Physics is concerned with the most fundamental aspects of matter and energy and how they interact to make the physical universe work. In accessible language and with explanatory graphics and visual aids, this book introduces readers to the science that is at the very center of all other sciences and essential to our very

Extraction and height estimation of artificial vertical structures based on the wrapped interferometric phase difference within their layovers

Science.gov (United States)

Uemoto, Jyunpei; Nadai, Akitsugu; Kojima, Shoichiro; Kobayashi, Tatsuharu; Umehara, Toshihiko; Matsuoka, Takeshi; Uratsuka, Seiho; Satake, Makoto

2018-05-01

The geometric modulation of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery such as radar shadow, foreshortening, and layover often complicates image interpretation while it contains useful information about targets. Recently, some methods for automatic building detection utilizing a peculiar pattern of phase differences (PDs) within building layovers on SAR interferograms have been proposed. One of the merits of these methods is the capability to detect buildings even taller than the height of ambiguity without incorporating any external data. In this paper, we propose a new method that has achieved the following improvements while maintaining the merit mentioned above. The first improvement is freedom from the dependence of target heights; without changing any parameters and thresholds, the proposed method can detect low-rise apartments to skyscrapers. The second one is the prevention of the false grouping of vertical structure constituents by considering relationships between their PDs. In addition, the method can measure the height of vertical structures without assuming their shape to be simple ones such as a parallelogram. These improvements have been verified by applying the method to real datasets acquired from an airborne X-band SAR. The quantitative assessment for apartment complexes has demonstrated the high performance of the method; the correctness and completeness are 94% and 83%, respectively. The mean error in the measured height is -0.2 m, while the standard deviation is 1.8 m. The verification using real datasets has revealed at the same time that the performance of the method can be degraded due to the crowdedness in dense urban areas including skyscrapers and owing to the poor discriminability between artificial vertical structures and trees. Overcoming these limitations is necessary in future studies.

Building Entry Loss and Delay Spread Measurements on a Simulated HAP-to-Indoor Link at S-Band

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Delgado-Penín JA

2008-01-01

Full Text Available Results from a measurement campaign emulating the high altitude platform (HAP-to-indoor communication channel at S-band are presented in this paper. A link was established between a transmitter carried by a helicopter, representing the HAP, and a receiver placed at several locations in different building types including an airport, an office building, a shopping mall, a residential house, and a skyscraper. A wideband, directive channel sounder was used to measure building entry loss and time delay spread. Results of the building entry loss are presented as a function of building type, elevation, and building entry angle. Results of delay spread for each building are also provided.

Building Entry Loss and Delay Spread Measurements on a Simulated HAP-to-Indoor Link at S-Band

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

P. Valtr

2008-07-01

Full Text Available Results from a measurement campaign emulating the high altitude platform (HAP-to-indoor communication channel at S-band are presented in this paper. A link was established between a transmitter carried by a helicopter, representing the HAP, and a receiver placed at several locations in different building types including an airport, an office building, a shopping mall, a residential house, and a skyscraper. A wideband, directive channel sounder was used to measure building entry loss and time delay spread. Results of the building entry loss are presented as a function of building type, elevation, and building entry angle. Results of delay spread for each building are also provided.

Economics of high-rise construction: the feasibility of skyscrapers building in the Russian cities

Science.gov (United States)

Petrov, Artur; Petrova, Daria

2018-03-01

The article considers the economic aspects of constructing high-rise buildings in the world and in Russia. Data on the number of high-rise buildings in Russian cities with a million population are presented. It is proved that interest in high-rise construction in Russia has been formed only in Moscow and partly in St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. The analysis showed that the reason for this is the expensiveness of high-rise construction. According to the enlarged macro-calculation, the cost of building 1 m2 of the area of the Federation Towers complex (Moscow City) is about 2710 /m2. Practically a possibility of return on investments in the foreseeable time interval exists only in Moscow. For the regions of Russia this task is rather complicated. Population density in regional Russian cities is quite low, business entities do not have the necessary financial resources for investing in high-rise construction, and investments from abroad absent.

The development of the architectural form of a tower derived from a traditional and philosophical symbol, realized by solutions of high-class technologies. The case of the Bitexco Financial Tower

Science.gov (United States)

Van Khai, Tran

2018-03-01

The Bitexco Financial Tower, majestically standing tall in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, rejects the box-shaped, abstract forms of modernism, incorporating an innovative idea of contemporary architecture. Based on the inspiration from the Bitexco Group, a renowned architect designedthe tower that became an iconic landmark of the city in the form of a lotus bud, one of the most iconic symbols of Vietnamese culture since ancient times. High class structural system solution designed by top international professional teams enable the building to rise high with its graceful, statuesque design of the lotus flower shape. CNNGo recently ranked the Bitexco Financial Tower fifth in their listing of the world's 20 most-iconic skyscrapers.

Curvilinear steel elements in load-bearing structures of high-rise building spatial frames

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ibragimov Alexander

2018-01-01

Full Text Available The application of curvilinear elements in load-bearing metal structures of high-rise buildings supposes ensuring of their bearing capacity and serviceability. There may exist a great variety of shapes and orientations of such structural elements. In particular, it may be various flat curves of an open or closed oval profile such as circular or parabolic arch or ellipse. The considered approach implies creating vast internal volumes without loss in the load-bearing capacity of the frame. The basic concept makes possible a wide variety of layout and design solutions. The presence of free internal spaces of large volume in "skyscraper" type buildings contributes to resolving a great number of problems, including those of communicative nature. The calculation results confirm the basic assumptions.

Free space-planning solutions in the architecture of multi-storey buildings

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ibragimov Alexander

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Here some aspects of the development of steel frame structure design from the standpoint of geometry and morphogenesis of bearing steel structures of civil engineering objects. An alternative approach to forming constructive schemes may be application of curved steel elements in the main load-bearing system. As an example, it may be circular and parabolic arches or segments of varying outline and orientation. The considered approach implies creating large internal volumes without loss in the load-bearing capacity of the frame. The basic concept makes possible a wide variety of layout and design solutions. The presence of free internal spaces of large volume in buildings of a "skyscraper" type contributes to resolving a great number of problems, including those of communicative nature.

Free space-planning solutions in the architecture of multi-storey buildings

Science.gov (United States)

Ibragimov, Alexander; Danilov, Alexander

2018-03-01

Here some aspects of the development of steel frame structure design from the standpoint of geometry and morphogenesis of bearing steel structures of civil engineering objects. An alternative approach to forming constructive schemes may be application of curved steel elements in the main load-bearing system. As an example, it may be circular and parabolic arches or segments of varying outline and orientation. The considered approach implies creating large internal volumes without loss in the load-bearing capacity of the frame. The basic concept makes possible a wide variety of layout and design solutions. The presence of free internal spaces of large volume in buildings of a "skyscraper" type contributes to resolving a great number of problems, including those of communicative nature.

Curvilinear steel elements in load-bearing structures of high-rise building spatial frames

Science.gov (United States)

Ibragimov, Alexander; Danilov, Alexander

2018-03-01

The application of curvilinear elements in load-bearing metal structures of high-rise buildings supposes ensuring of their bearing capacity and serviceability. There may exist a great variety of shapes and orientations of such structural elements. In particular, it may be various flat curves of an open or closed oval profile such as circular or parabolic arch or ellipse. The considered approach implies creating vast internal volumes without loss in the load-bearing capacity of the frame. The basic concept makes possible a wide variety of layout and design solutions. The presence of free internal spaces of large volume in "skyscraper" type buildings contributes to resolving a great number of problems, including those of communicative nature. The calculation results confirm the basic assumptions.

Long-distance free-space distribution of quantum entanglement over Vienna

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Lindenthal, M.; Resch, K.; Blauensteiner, B.; Boehm, H.; Fedrizzi, A.; Kurtsiefer, C.; Poppe, A.; Schmitt-Manderbach, T.; Taraba, M.; Ursin, R.; Walther, P.; Weier, H.; Weinfurter, H.; Zeilinger, A.

2005-01-01

Full text: We have established a real-world free-space quantum channel over 7.8 km and demonstrate the distribution of entangled photons. The transmitter is placed at an observatory and the receiver on the 46th floor of an office skyscraper in Vienna, Austria. Using locally recorded time stamps and a public internet channel, coincident counts from correlated photons are demonstrated to violate a Bell inequality by 14 standard deviations. This confirms the high quality of the shared entanglement. In this experiment the horizontal freespace distance is chosen, so that the attenuation the light undergoes corresponds approximately to the attenuation from space to earth. This work is an encouraging step towards satellite-based distribution of quantum entanglement and future intra-city quantum networks. (author)

Benjamin and Koolhaas: History's Afterlife

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Frances Hsu

2016-05-01

Full Text Available Dialectical images are at the core of the methods suggested by two books written four decades apart yet published around the same time. The Arcades Project (first published as Das Passagen-Werk in 1981 and Delirious New York (1978 use images to critique established modes of historical interpretation. Each proposes a methodology of historical speculation based on the interpretation of fragmentary visual phenomena. Both construct alternative historical narratives about the impact of technology, mass culture and economy on the city. This essay contrasts and compares the similarities and differences between the respective authors’ treatments of the nineteenth century arcade and the Manhattan skyscraper to examine how the strategies and definitions suggested by Benjamin and Koolhaas address the function of images as tools for critical architectural analysis and knowledge.

Cost comparisons

CERN Multimedia

CERN Bulletin

2010-01-01

How much does the LHC cost? And how much does this represent in other currencies? Below we present a table showing some comparisons with the cost of other projects. Looking at the figures, you will see that the cost of the LHC can be likened to that of three skyscrapers, or two seasons of Formula 1 racing! One year's budget of a single large F1 team is comparable to the entire materials cost of the ATLAS or CMS experiments.   Please note that all the figures are rounded for ease of reading.    CHF € $   LHC 4.6 billions 3 billions  4 billions   Space Shuttle Endeavour (NASA) 1.9 billion 1.3 billion 1.7 billion   Hubble Space Telescope (cost at launch – NASA/...

‘Our Changes’? Visions of the Future in Nairobi

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Constance Smith

2017-03-01

Full Text Available In Kenya, the Vision 2030 masterplan is radically reimagining Nairobi as a ‘world class’ city of the future. This has generated dramatic digital imagery of satellite cities, skyscrapers and shopping malls. For tenants in rundown public housing, these glossy yet speculative visions are enticing, but also provoke anxieties of exclusion. Yet so far, little has materially manifested. This article explores the effects these future vistas produce in the present, in the gap between the urban plan and its implementation. It argues that the spectacle of official planning has generated anticipatory actions, as Nairobians’ engage with the future promised by such schemes. These actions are characterised by dissonant temporal experiences, in which local residents experience the future city as both near at hand and forever out of reach.

Microtechnology: The key to the technical challenges of the 21st century

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Ceglio, N.M.

1993-08-01

Through the ages each culture and civilization has expressed its values and world view in the form of monuments derived from its most advanced and valued technologies. From pyramids to cathedrals, skyscrapers and moon rockets, our technology has enabled us to leave our mark on the landscape and in the minds of our people. In the 21st century, the compelling technology will be that of the micro-world, enabling the fabrication of structures with features smaller than the wavelengths of light. Such structures will allow use to monitor and control electrical, chemical, and optical phenomena in ways never before imagined. As in the past we will continue to create monuments, but the technological monuments of the 21st century will likely be viewed through a microscope. This report provides a discussion of microtechnology in the 21st century.

The Feasibility of Utilizing Wind Energy in Commercial Buildings With Special Reference to the Kingdom of Bahrain

Science.gov (United States)

Abdulrahim Saeed, Saeed

2017-11-01

This article shall investigate the feasibility of utilizing wind energy for commercial buildings with special reference to the Kingdom of Bahrain. Bahrain World Trade Center which was built in 2008, is located in the city of Manama. The fifty-story complex contains identical twin towers that rise over 240 meters in height. The towers are connected by three bridges which hold three turbines each 29 meters long. The three turbines were originally design to provide electric energy required for lighting. The Bahrain World Trade Center was selected as a case study to investigate the feasibility of utilizing wind energy technologies in skyscrapers with special reference to the Kingdom of Bahrain. It is hoped that the findings and conclusion of the study shall be of some value for future utilization of wind energy in the GCC countries and the world at large.

Preliminary Reconnaissance Report of the 2011 Tohoku-Chiho Taiheiyo-Oki Earthquake

CERN Document Server

Architectural Institute of Japan

2012-01-01

Devastating damage in the Tohoku region of Japan occurred during and after the massive earthquake off the Pacific coast, the Tohoku earthquake, on March 11, 2011. The Architectural Institute of Japan dispatched reconnaissance teams into the field to obtain basic facts on the damage to buildings due to the massive ground motions and resultant tsunami. Their mission included collecting information on the characteristics of the earthquake itself and the observed major ground motions and tsunamis throughout the area. For the investigation of structural damage, buildings are classified by their type of construction—steel buildings, reinforced concrete buildings, wooden houses, and others—along with descriptions of special features for each category of building type. This report summarizes damage associated with ground failures including landslides and liquefaction as well as nonstructural damages such as to equipment and facilities, partitioning walls and ceilings, and functional failures in skyscrapers. A bri...

Evaluation model of project complexity for large-scale construction projects in Iran - A Fuzzy ANP approach

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aliyeh Kazemi

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Construction projects have always been complex. By growing trend of this complexity, implementations of large-scale constructions become harder. Hence, evaluating and understanding these complexities are critical. Correct evaluation of a project complication can provide executives and managers with good source to use. Fuzzy analytic network process (ANP is a logical and systematic approach toward defining, evaluation, and grading. This method allows for analyzing complex systems, and determining complexity of them. In this study, by taking advantage of fuzzy ANP, effective indexes for development of complications in large-scale construction projects in Iran have been determined and prioritized. The results show socio-political, project system interdependencies, and technological complexity indexes ranked top to three. Furthermore, in comparison of three main huge projects: commercial-administrative, hospital, and skyscrapers, the hospital project had been evaluated as the most complicated. This model is beneficial for professionals in managing large-scale projects.

Strategies and Challenges for Energy Efficient Retrofitting: Study of the Empire State Building

Science.gov (United States)

De, B.; Mukherjee, M.

2013-11-01

Operational and maintenance cost of existing buildings is escalating making it tough for both the owner and the tenants. Retrofitting them with state of the art technologies help them to keep pace with amended recent code provisions and thus extending the older building stocks one more chance to live responsively. Retrofitted iconic buildings can thus retain their status in commerce driven real estate sector. It helps in reducing green house gas emission as well. World's iconic skyscraper, the Empire State Building (ESB), has undergone an exemplary retrofit process since 2008 to reduce its energy demands. To achieve the goal of operational cost and energy consumption reduction, stiff challenges had taken care in a systematic manner to realize benefit throughout the entire lifespan of the ESB. Least disturbances to the tenant and on-site component handling strategies required precise planning. The present paper explores strategies and process adopted for retrofitting the ESB, and derived insightful guidelines towards operational cost savings and energy efficiency of existing buildings through retrofitting.

High-Rise Construction in Densely Dwelled Cities: Requirements for Premises Insolation and Consequences of their Violation in Russian Law and Jurisprudence

Science.gov (United States)

Gongalo, Boris; Gudovicheva, Lubov; Gubareva, Anna; Dobrynina, Larisa

2018-03-01

The issues of constructing high-rise, primarily residential, buildings have a great social significance. Not every plot of land, acquired in the Russian Federation is suitable for high-rise construction. Therefore, every construction company that plans to erect a multi-apartment building, a high-rise office building, or a skyscraper must take into account not only technical norms but as well sanitary legislation regulations that set obligatory requirements about insolation of apartments. The article includes a short study of several norms in the Russian legislation regarding insolation of dwellings; analises the problems of judicial interpretation of the statutory limitations. In this aspect it researches the debatable questions arising in practice of state arbitration courts dealing with the lawsuits on allocation of land-plots by the local administration. The analysis of the judicial practice is followed by description of the difficulties facing the developers of land-plots, concerning the project and territorial planning documentation.

The power of stars

CERN Document Server

Penprase, Bryan E

2017-01-01

Completely revised and updated, this new edition provides a readable, beautifully illustrated journey through world cultures and the vibrant array of sky mythology, creation stories, models of the universe, temples and skyscrapers that each culture has created to celebrate and respond to the power of the night sky. Sections on the archaeoastronomy of South Asia and South East Asia have been expanded, with original photography and new research on temple alignments in Southern India, and new material describing the astronomical practices of Indonesia, Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries. Beautiful photographs of temples in India and Asia have been added, as well as new diagrams explaining the alignment of these structures and the astronomical underpinnings of temples within the Pallava and Chola cultures. From new fieldwork in the Four Corners region of North America, Dr. Penprase has included accounts of Pueblo skywatching and photographs of ceremonial kivas that help elucidate the rich astronomical k...

Model of investment appraisal of high-rise construction with account of cost of land resources

Science.gov (United States)

Okolelova, Ella; Shibaeva, Marina; Trukhina, Natalya

2018-03-01

The article considers problems and potential of high-rise construction as a global urbanization. The results of theoretical and practical studies on the appraisal of investments in high-rise construction are provided. High-rise construction has a number of apparent upsides in modern terms of development of megapolises and primarily it is economically efficient. Amid serious lack of construction sites, skyscrapers successfully deal with the need of manufacturing, office and living premises. Nevertheless, there are plenty issues, which are related with high-rise construction, and only thorough scrutiny of them allow to estimate the real economic efficiency of this branch. The article focuses on the question of economic efficiency of high-rise construction. The suggested model allows adjusting the parameters of a facility under construction, setting the tone for market value as well as the coefficient for appreciation of the construction net cost, that depends on the number of storey's, in the form of function or discrete values.

High-Performance CuInS ₂ Quantum Dot Laminated Glass Luminescent Solar Concentrators for Windows

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bergren, Matthew R. [UbiQD, Inc., Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544, United States; Makarov, Nikolay S. [UbiQD, Inc., Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544, United States; Ramasamy, Karthik [UbiQD, Inc., Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544, United States; Jackson, Aaron [UbiQD, Inc., Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544, United States; Guglielmetti, Rob [National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, Colorado 80401, United States; McDaniel, Hunter [UbiQD, Inc., Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544, United States

2018-01-30

Building-integrated sunlight harvesting utilizing laminated glass luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) is proposed. By incorporating high quantum yield (>90%), NIR-emitting CuInS2/ZnS quantum dots into the polymer interlayer between two sheets of low-iron float glass, a record optical efficiency of 8.1% is demonstrated for a 10 cm x 10 cm device that transmits ~44% visible light. After completing prototypes by attaching silicon solar cells along the perimeter of the device, the electrical power conversion efficiency was certified at 2.2% with a black background and at 2.9% using a reflective substrate. This 'drop-in' LSC solution is particularly attractive because it fits within the existing glazing industry value chain with only modest changes to typical glazing products. Performance modeling predicts >1 GWh annual electricity production for a typical urban skyscraper in most major U.S. cities, enabling significant energy cost savings and potentially 'net-zero' buildings.

Tall Buildings and Elevators: A Review of Recent Technological Advances

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kheir Al-Kodmany

2015-09-01

Full Text Available Efficient vertical mobility is a critical component of tall building development and construction. This paper investigates recent advances in elevator technology and examines their impact on tall building development. It maps out, organizes, and collates complex and scattered information on multiple aspects of elevator design, and presents them in an accessible and non-technical discourse. Importantly, the paper contextualizes recent technological innovations by examining their implementations in recent major projects including One World Trade Center in New York; Shanghai Tower in Shanghai; Burj Khalifa in Dubai; Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and the green retrofit project of the Empire State Building in New York. Further, the paper discusses future vertical transportation models including a vertical subway concept, a space lift, and electromagnetic levitation technology. As these new technological advancements in elevator design empower architects to create new forms and shapes of large-scale, mixed-use developments, this paper concludes by highlighting the need for interdisciplinary research in incorporating elevators in skyscrapers.

Globe: Lecture series

CERN Multimedia

2007-01-01

The LHC: an accelerator of science This series of lectures is all about understanding the scientific and technological challenges of the phenomenal LHC project and assessing its innovations through their everyday applications. Come and take a sneak preview of the LHC! Communicate: the Grid, a computer of global dimensions François Grey, head of communication in CERN’s Information Technology Department How will it be possible for the 15 million billion bytes of data generated by the LHC every year to be handled and stored by a computer that doesn’t have to be the size of a skyscraper? The computer scientists have the answer: the Grid, which will harness the power of tens of thousands of computers all over the world by creating a network of computers and making them operate as one. >>> Lectures are free and require no specialist knowledge. In french. 
 >>> By reservation only: tel. +41 (0)22 767 76 76

Mathematical methods for elastic plates

CERN Document Server

Constanda, Christian

2014-01-01

Mathematical models of deformation of elastic plates are used by applied mathematicians and engineers in connection with a wide range of practical applications, from microchip production to the construction of skyscrapers and aircraft. This book employs two important analytic techniques to solve the fundamental boundary value problems for the theory of plates with transverse shear deformation, which offers a more complete picture of the physical process of bending than Kirchhoff’s classical one.   The first method transfers the ellipticity of the governing system to the boundary, leading to singular integral equations on the contour of the domain. These equations, established on the basis of the properties of suitable layer potentials, are then solved in spaces of smooth (Hölder continuous and Hölder continuously differentiable) functions.   The second technique rewrites the differential system in terms of complex variables and fully integrates it, expressing the solution as a combination of complex ana...

Interactive design of probability density functions for shape grammars

KAUST Repository

Dang, Minh

2015-11-02

A shape grammar defines a procedural shape space containing a variety of models of the same class, e.g. buildings, trees, furniture, airplanes, bikes, etc. We present a framework that enables a user to interactively design a probability density function (pdf) over such a shape space and to sample models according to the designed pdf. First, we propose a user interface that enables a user to quickly provide preference scores for selected shapes and suggest sampling strategies to decide which models to present to the user to evaluate. Second, we propose a novel kernel function to encode the similarity between two procedural models. Third, we propose a framework to interpolate user preference scores by combining multiple techniques: function factorization, Gaussian process regression, autorelevance detection, and l1 regularization. Fourth, we modify the original grammars to generate models with a pdf proportional to the user preference scores. Finally, we provide evaluations of our user interface and framework parameters and a comparison to other exploratory modeling techniques using modeling tasks in five example shape spaces: furniture, low-rise buildings, skyscrapers, airplanes, and vegetation.

Discovery Mondays: 'The Grid: a universal computer'

CERN Multimedia

2006-01-01

How can one store and analyse the 15 million billion pieces of data that the LHC will produce each year with a computer that isn't the size of a sky-scraper? The IT experts have found the answer: the Grid, which will harness the power of tens of thousands of computers in the world by putting them together on one network and making them work like a single computer achieving a power that has not yet been matched. The Grid, inspired from the Web, already exists - in fact, several of them exist in the field of science. The European EGEE project, led by CERN, contributes not only to the study of particle physics but to medical research as well, notably in the study of malaria and avian flu. The next Discovery Monday invites you to explore this futuristic computing technology. The 'Grid Masters' of CERN have prepared lively animations to help you understand how the Grid works. Children can practice saving the planet on the Grid video game. You will also discover other applications such as UNOSAT, a United Nations...

Deformation Characteristics of Ultrahigh-Strength Concrete under Unrestrained and Restrained States

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joo-Ha Lee

2017-01-01

Full Text Available As structures like skyscrapers and long-span bridges become larger, the demand for higher strength of concrete is increasing. However, research on ultrahigh-strength concrete (UHSC is still in its infancy. In particular, UHSC is known to have a considerably higher level of autogenous shrinkage than normal strength concrete (NSC, and the possibility of cracking at an early age is very high. Therefore, in this study, shrinkage and cracking behavior of high-strength concrete (HSC, very-high-strength concrete (VHSC, and UHSC were evaluated through unrestrained shrinkage test and restrained shrinkage test (ring test. The primary experimental variables are the compressive strength level according to the water-to-binder ratio (W/B, fly ash content, and concrete specimen thickness. The experimental results demonstrated that the drying shrinkage decreased as the W/B ratio and the fly ash replacement ratio increased, and the restraint cracks appeared to be the earliest and most brittle in the UHSC with the smallest W/B. Increased concrete thickness and incorporation of fly ash were observed to inhibit crack initiation effectively.

LEED conformity inside and outside. Headquarters of the Deutsche Boerse in LEED {sup registered} Platin; Aussen und innen LEED-konform. Zentrale der Deutschen Boerse in LEED {sup registered} Platin

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bloedorn, Heike

2011-07-01

Due to the sustainable design of building, the new corporate headquarters of the group German Stock Exchange in Frankfurt (Federal Republic of Germany) with an investment of nearly 230 million Euro has been distinguished as the first skyscraper in Germany with the LEED platinum certification (as the highest category of the U.S. Green Building Council). The design of the 21-story building was by the architects KSP Engel Juergen Architekten GmbH (Frankfurt, Federal Republic of Germany). The project was developed by Gross Partner and Grundstuecksentwicklungsgesellschaft mbH (Frankfurt, Federal Republic of Germany) and Lang and Cie. Real Estate (Frankfurt, Federal Republic of Germany). The innovative energy concept was realized by Lenz Weber Ingenieure (Frankfurt, Federal Republic of Germany) in cooperation with EB-Partner GmbH and Co. KG (Frankfurt/Nuernberg, Federal Republic) and TP Electrical Plan (Gaggenau, Federal Republic of Germany). The stringent sustainability criteria in the interior construction were accomplished by feco wood materials in the form of displaceable system partition walls and sound absorbing doors.

Toward Generalization of Iterative Small Molecule Synthesis.

Science.gov (United States)

Lehmann, Jonathan W; Blair, Daniel J; Burke, Martin D

2018-02-01

Small molecules have extensive untapped potential to benefit society, but access to this potential is too often restricted by limitations inherent to the customized approach currently used to synthesize this class of chemical matter. In contrast, the "building block approach", i.e., generalized iterative assembly of interchangeable parts, has now proven to be a highly efficient and flexible way to construct things ranging all the way from skyscrapers to macromolecules to artificial intelligence algorithms. The structural redundancy found in many small molecules suggests that they possess a similar capacity for generalized building block-based construction. It is also encouraging that many customized iterative synthesis methods have been developed that improve access to specific classes of small molecules. There has also been substantial recent progress toward the iterative assembly of many different types of small molecules, including complex natural products, pharmaceuticals, biological probes, and materials, using common building blocks and coupling chemistry. Collectively, these advances suggest that a generalized building block approach for small molecule synthesis may be within reach.

Toward Generalization of Iterative Small Molecule Synthesis

Science.gov (United States)

Lehmann, Jonathan W.; Blair, Daniel J.; Burke, Martin D.

2018-01-01

Small molecules have extensive untapped potential to benefit society, but access to this potential is too often restricted by limitations inherent to the customized approach currently used to synthesize this class of chemical matter. In contrast, the “building block approach”, i.e., generalized iterative assembly of interchangeable parts, has now proven to be a highly efficient and flexible way to construct things ranging all the way from skyscrapers to macromolecules to artificial intelligence algorithms. The structural redundancy found in many small molecules suggests that they possess a similar capacity for generalized building block-based construction. It is also encouraging that many customized iterative synthesis methods have been developed that improve access to specific classes of small molecules. There has also been substantial recent progress toward the iterative assembly of many different types of small molecules, including complex natural products, pharmaceuticals, biological probes, and materials, using common building blocks and coupling chemistry. Collectively, these advances suggest that a generalized building block approach for small molecule synthesis may be within reach. PMID:29696152

Analysis, biomedicine, collaboration, and determinism challenges and guidance: wish list for biopharmaceuticals on the interface of computing and statistics.

Science.gov (United States)

Goodman, Arnold F

2011-11-01

I have personally witnessed processing advance from desk calculators and mainframes, through timesharing and PCs, to supercomputers and cloud computing. I have also witnessed resources grow from too little data into almost too much data, and from theory dominating data into data beginning to dominate theory while needing new theory. Finally, I have witnessed problems advance from simple in a lone discipline into becoming almost too complex in multiple disciplines, as well as approaches evolve from analysis driving solutions into solutions by data mining beginning to drive the analysis itself. How we do all of this has transitioned from competition overcoming collaboration into collaboration starting to overcome competition, as well as what is done being more important than how it is done has transitioned into how it is done becoming as important as what is done. In addition, what or how we do it being more important than what or how we should actually do it has shifted into what or how we should do it becoming just as important as what or how we do it, if not more so. Although we have come a long way in both our methodology and technology, are they sufficient for our current or future complex and multidisciplinary problems with their massive databases? Since the apparent answer is not a resounding yes, we are presented with tremendous challenges and opportunities. This personal perspective adapts my background and experience to be appropriate for biopharmaceuticals. In these times of exploding change, informed perspectives on what challenges should be explored with accompanying guidance may be even more valuable than the far more typical literature reviews in conferences and journals of what has already been accomplished without challenges or guidance. Would we believe that an architect who designs a skyscraper determines the skyscraper's exact exterior, interior and furnishings or only general characteristics? Why not increase dependability of conclusions in

The history of aggregate development in the denver, Co area

Science.gov (United States)

Langer, W.H.

2009-01-01

At the start of the 20th century Denver's population was 203,795. Most streets were unpaved. Buildings were constructed of wood frame or masonry. Transport was by horse-drawn-wagon or rail. Statewide, aggregate consumption was less than 0.25 metric tons per person per year. One hundred years later Denver had a population of 2,365,345. Today Denver is a major metropolitan area at the crossroads of two interstates, home to a new international airport, and in the process of expanding its light rail transit system. The skyline is punctuated with skyscrapers. The urban center is surrounded with edge cities. These changes required huge amounts of aggregate. Statewide, aggregate consumption increased 50 fold to over 13 metric tons per person per year. Denver has a large potential supply of aggregate, but sand and gravel quality decreases downstream from the mountain front and potential sources of crushed stone occur in areas prized for their scenic beauty. These issues, along with urban encroachment and citizen opposition, have complicated aggregate development and have paved a new path for future aggregate development including sustainable resource management and reclamation techniques.

Fuel cells and the city of the future — a Japanese view

Science.gov (United States)

Satomi, Tomohide

The development and practical application of fuel cells have been promoted aggressively in Japan, and the on-site phosphoric acid fuel cell (PAFC) has been attained with the prospect for practical market enery in commercial buildings by the middle of the 1990s. Fuel cells have features of less environmental impact and high energy efficiency which meet the requirements of the utility system for the future city. In Japan, the recent concentration of social functions and population to the city have begun to cause many serious problems. To resolve these environmental and resource related problems and to move towards developing and constructing a new city, one answer offered is the concept of CAN (community amenity network). CAN is a sophisticated utility system which integrates fuel cells as well as a system for effective use of unused energy and recycling of waste disposal and water. For solving the housing shortage problem in the next century, the concept of skyscraper building cities is currently proposed. Fuel cell systems can also be applied to these cities as a major element of the integrated zone energy supply network facility.

High speed elevator s rise high rise building; Chokoso biru wo kakenoboru elevator

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Tanabe, K. [Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Tokyo (Japan)

1994-10-20

The world`s fastest (750 m/min) elevators are operating in Yokohama Landmark Tower. This paper describes how engineers solved the technological problems to realize the high-speed elevator. Buildings in Japan have become higher and higher. At the present, this Tower is the highest in Japan (296 m, 70 stories). The Ministry of Construction is going to start a research team to study construction of buildings of the order of 1,000 m high. An important issue for a skyscraper is how to reduce the elevator space adapting to the increase of the number of inhabitants in the building. The basic solution is to increase the elevator speed and to plan the best elevator moving line. The 120 kW AC motor direct-driven winding machine that withstands the superhigh-speed suspending load was developed. Vibrations from the motor and the mechanical system are minimized and the touch-down tolerances for the elevator cage are controlled to {plus_minus}15 mm. The safety devices of the elevator include the emergency stopper of special ceramic material and the hydraulic shock absorber with the optimum reduction characteristic. 2 refs., 3 figs.

Beyond the bioclimatic

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Potangaroa, R.T.

2006-01-01

Central to the bioclimatic skyscraper design of architect Ken Yeang has been the adoption of passive energy approaches to achieve both economic and economic and ecological benefits. Such as approach sough to lower energy consumption by utilizing for example natural ventilation for thermal cooling and then supplementing that with active or mechanical means to achieve the required thermal comfort for building occupants. In addition, building occupants also expected and enhanced experience, an experience that Yeang created using: planting and vegetation, deep and high sky gardens and courtyards, facades that acted as buffers and filters rather than sealing the outside, the use of wind for natural ventilation. This paper focuses on the natural ventilation component of this approach and reviews the techniques that Yeang suggests (such as core location, building orientation, air wells, sun shades and solar orientation) and reviews their impact on the natural ventilation potential of the building. The development of new tools now allows designers to quantify the impact of such measures and thus presents the opportunity for designers to create better quality buildings that are not only healthy for occupants, economic for building owners but also inspirational for all

Compare the difference of architecture design in Hong Kong and Penang – Exterior wall

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Liu Wen Tao

2015-12-01

Full Text Available This research focuses on the exterior wall of architecture design of Hong Kong and Penang, it also analyzes how light pollution affects human life. As we know, Hong Kong prefers to use steel to build skyscrapers and middle or high rise buildings. However, Penang prefers to use concrete to do the construction. So, there are some advantages and disadvantages between the glass curtain wall and concrete wall in Hong Kong and Penang. The researcher used 400 samples to determine effect of the glass curtain wall and concrete wall on human life in Hong Kong and Penang separately. The result is light pollution created by glass curtain wall in Hong Kong is a serious problem to residents’ life. The glass curtain wall seriously glaze people’s eyes who drive or walk on the street. Thus, many car accidents were caused by this problem. The concrete wall is more often contaminated by fungus and difficult to clean. But, concrete wall is more natural and green for humans. Therefore, from the sustainable aspect that concrete is more healthy for humans, the previous researchers suggest that if the exterior wall is a mixture of both glass curtain and concrete it will not cause light pollution and will be easily involved in the natural environment.

The Elusiveness of Welfare-State Specificity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tahl Kaminer

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Review of Architecture and the Welfare State, edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015.Incomprehensibly, the relation of architecture to society is, on the one hand, a trivial fact, and, on the other, a perplexing assumption. Trivial, because the evidence of the tight relationship is ubiquitous, screaming its existence from the tops of skyscrapers, from the basements of gloomy panopticon prisons, and from the doorsteps of Levittown houses. Perplexing, because, despite of such an abundance of evidence, the actual form of such a relationship remains contested and, mostly, obscure. This review article will interrogate the relation of architecture to society via the recently published anthology Architecture and the Welfare State, edited by Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete and Dirk van den Heuvel. The anthology postulates that a rigorous correlation can be established between architectural design and the welfare state. The review article, in turn, posits two questions to the anthology: what is specific about the welfare state which differentiates it from other societies of the era, and how is a rigorous correlation of a specific form of architecture to the welfare state established, beyond limited notions such as zeitgeist? 

Advanced High Strength Steel in Auto Industry: an Overview

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

N. Baluch

2014-08-01

Full Text Available The world’s most common alloy, steel, is the material of choice when it comes to making products as diverse as oil rigs to cars and planes to skyscrapers, simply because of its functionality, adaptability, machine-ability and strength. Newly developed grades of Advanced High Strength Steel (AHSS significantly outperform competing materials for current and future automotive applications. This is a direct result of steel’s performance flexibility, as well as of its many benefits including low cost, weight reduction capability, safety attributes, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and superior recyclability. To improve crash worthiness and fuel economy, the automotive industry is, increasingly, using AHSS. Today, and in the future, automotive manufacturers must reduce the overall weight of their cars. The most cost-efficient way to do this is with AHSS. However, there are several parameters that decide which of the AHSS types to be used; the most important parameters are derived from the geometrical form of the component and the selection of forming and blanking methods. This paper describes the different types of AHSS, highlights their advantages for use in auto metal stampings, and discusses about the new challenges faced by stampers, particularly those serving the automotive industry.

Climate-sensitive urban design through Envi-Met simulation: case study in Kemayoran, Jakarta

Science.gov (United States)

Kusumastuty, K. D.; Poerbo, H. W.; Koerniawan, M. D.

2018-03-01

Indonesia as a tropical country which the character of its climate are hot and humid, the outdoor activity applications are often disrupted due to discomfort in thermal conditions. Massive construction of skyscrapers in urban areas are caused by the increase of human population leads to reduced green and infiltration areas that impact to environmental imbalances and triggering microclimate changes with rising air temperatures on the surface. The area that significantly experiences the rise of temperature in the Central Business District (CBD), which has need an analysis to create thermal comfort conditions to improve the ease of outdoor activities by an approach. This study aims to design the Kemayoran CBD through Climate Sensitive Urban Design especially in hot and humid tropical climate area and analyze thermal comfort level and optimal air conditioning in the outdoor area. This research used a quantitative method by generating the design using Climate Sensitive Urban Design principle through Envi-met 4.1 simulation program to find out the value of PMV, air temperature, wind speed and relative humidity conditions. The design area considers the configuration of buildings such as the distance between buildings, the average height, the orientation of the building, and the width of the road.

Dual certification for bank skyscrapers. A company headquarter gets a Green Building; Duale Zertifizierung fuer Bank-Tuerme. Eine Konzernzentrale wird zum Green Building

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Luft, Christian; Bauer, Michael [Drees und Sommer Advanced Building Technologies GmbH, Stuttgart (Germany)

2011-07-01

Fire protection regulations force the Deutsche Bank AG (Frankfurt/Main, Federal Republic of Germany) to extensive reorganization measures in order to continuously operate their buildings. As part of a complete renovation, Deutsche Bank AG has stipulated a modern, innovative and sustainable example. This is confirmed by the Green Building Certification with the US american label LEED registered in Platinum as well as the German sustainability certificate of the Germain Sustainable Building Council (Stuttgart, Federal Republic of Germany) in gold.

Trend analysis of modern high-rise construction

Science.gov (United States)

Radushinsky, Dmitry; Gubankov, Andrey; Mottaeva, Asiiat

2018-03-01

The article reviews the main trends of modern high-rise construction considered a number of architectural, engineering and technological, economic and image factors that have influenced the intensification of construction of high-rise buildings in the 21st century. The key factors of modern high-rise construction are identified, which are associated with an attractive image component for businessmen and politicians, with the ability to translate current views on architecture and innovations in construction technologies and the lobbying of relevant structures, as well as the opportunity to serve as an effective driver in the development of a complex of national economy sectors with the achievement of a multiplicative effect. The estimation of the priority nature of participation of foreign architectural bureaus in the design of super-high buildings in Russia at the present stage is given. The issue of economic expediency of construction of high-rise buildings, including those with only a residential function, has been investigated. The connection between the construction of skyscrapers as an important component of the image of cities in the marketing of places and territories, the connection of the availability of a high-rise center, the City, with the possibilities of attracting a "creative class" and the features of creating a large working space for specialists on the basis of territorial proximity and density of high-rise buildings.

Living in the “Ghost City”: Media Discourses and the Negotiation of Home in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Duo Yin

2017-11-01

Full Text Available Ordos is notoriously represented in media discourses as one of China’s principal “ghost cities”, with skyscrapers, apartment estates and grandiose squares largely unoccupied. The “ghost city” emerges from massive (overinvestment in the urban built environment. Aware that economic and financial sustainability are in question, we nonetheless choose to investigate this issue from the perspective of social sustainability, utilizing a theoretical framework informed by geographies of home. Relatively little analysis has thus far been applied to local residents’ everyday practice and agency in making place and home in allegedly “unhomely” ghost cities. This article first examines media discourses and representations of the “ghostly” aspect of the new town in Ordos. It then investigates the ways in which local residents practice and perform their place identity and sense of home in an alleged “ghost city”. Our empirical research in Kangbashi New Town demonstrates that the discourse of ghost cities is valid in so far as we take into account the local residents’ engagement in a process of home-making from below. This sense of place is created by connecting new and old homes, and constructing an emotionally delineated place identity. We argue that the issue of social sustainability in Ordos is multifaceted, and more nuanced than it has hitherto been represented in media reports.

The foundation of self-esteem.

Science.gov (United States)

Bailey, Joseph A

2003-05-01

Self-esteem is a simplistic term for varied and complex mental states pertaining to how one views oneself. It takes but little research in the voluminous literature to see the vagueness and inconsistencies in its various definitions. Even more problematic is the uncertainty concerning its foundational components. The importance of having a solid definition and specific ideas about the foundational components of self-esteem is that both pave the way to recognizing its causes; to predicting effects from those causes; and to organizing the trouble-shooting process for locating those philosophical flaws or psychological scars which lead to low self-esteem. The purpose of this paper is to offer a common ground for thinking about self-esteem at its most basic level. In order to distinguish the "basic level" from the rest of the components of self-esteem, let us liken it to a skyscraper building. Here, the focus is on the building's "underground foundation" and the base upon which that foundation rests. The base is a definition that allows for the assessment of the foundation. The underground foundation itself consists of the mental building blocks called self-meaning, self-identity, self-image, and self-concepts. To help illustrate their interactions, a few of the "masks" and "faces" of self-esteem will be mentioned. What is not being addressed is the "above ground structure"--those theories and manifestations dealt with by most mental health specialists.

Postsocrealistički arhitektonski onirizam na primerima filmova i stripova Enkija Bilala / (Postsocrealistic Architectural Onirism in Examples of Bilal’s Films and Comic Strips

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jelena Smiljanić

2013-12-01

Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to analyze and explore the way the media have transformed film and comic strips by applying an interdisciplinary approach to three dystopian, phantasmagorical science-fiction movies by Enki Bilal: Bunker Palace Hotel (1989, Tykho Moon (1996 and Immortal Ad Vitam (2004 using them as case studies. All three films are a cinematic view of postapocalyptic cities – Belgrade, Paris and New York in which Bilal’s narrative dramatizes specific problems associated with postmodernism – linking ancient mythologies with the dictatorships of Eastern European authoritative political systems and creating a strong aesthetics of a specific dreamlike degenerative world of humans and androids in which existentialism is examined. The art of socio-realistic hyperrealism is presented as a paradigm. The architecture used in the films is a hybrid of ultra modern skyscrapers of industrial structure, full of eclectic post-modern forms, while the city is a deformed, polluted, post-nuclear wasteland used as an allegory of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s. The deformed architectural portraits of these towns are pictorially dependent on German Expressionism as seen in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927 and show the influence of Futurism and the Bauhaus. The combined influence of Hieronymus Bosch and Joseph Stalin as well as that of Egyptian mythology creates Bilal’s profoundly individual universe. The distorted and postmodern architectural expression is seen as a dystopian vision of the future.

Multi-scale modeling of the environmental impact and energy performance of open-loop groundwater heat pumps in urban areas

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Sciacovelli, A.; Guelpa, E.; Verda, V.

2014-01-01

Groundwater heat pumps are expected to play a major role in future energy scenarios. Proliferation of such systems in urban areas may generate issues related to possible interference between installations. These issues are associated with the thermal plume produced by heat pumps during operation and are particularly evident in the case of groundwater flow, because of the advection heat transfer. In this paper, the impact of an installation is investigated through a thermo-fluid dynamic model of the subsurface which considers fluid flow in the saturated unit and heat transfer in both the saturated and unsaturated units. Due to the large extension of the affected area, a multiscale numerical model that combines a three-dimensional CFD model and a network model is proposed. The thermal request of the user and the heat pump performances are considered in the multi-scale numerical model through appropriate boundary conditions imposed at the wells. Various scenarios corresponding to different operating modes of the heat pump are considered. - Highlights: • A groundwater heat pump of a skyscraper under construction is considered. • The thermal plume induced in the groundwater is evaluated using a multi-scale model. • The multi-scale model is constituted by a full 3D model and a network model. • Multi-scale permits to study large space for long time with low computational costs. • In some cases thermal plume can reduce the COP of other heat pumps of 20%

A polysaccharide of Dendrobium officinale ameliorates H2O2-induced apoptosis in H9c2 cardiomyocytes via PI3K/AKT and MAPK pathways.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Jing-Yi; Guo, Ying; Si, Jin-Ping; Sun, Xiao-Bo; Sun, Gui-Bo; Liu, Jing-Jing

2017-11-01

Dendrobium officinale is one valuable traditional Chinese medicine, which has skyscraping medicinal value. Polysaccharide is the main active ingredient in D. officinale; its antioxidant activity is a hot research topic nowadays. Oxidative stress plays an important role in the pathological progress of a variety of cardiovascular disease, as one of key factors of cardiomyocyte apoptosis. This research adopts a model of H 2 O 2 induction-H9c2 cardiomyocytes apoptosis, aiming to study the effect of Dendrobium officinale Polysaccharide (DOP-GY) for cardiomyocyte apoptosis caused by oxidative stress and its possible mechanism. Our results showed that pretreatment of DOP-GY (low dose: 6.25μg/mL, medium dose: 12.5μg/mL, high dose: 25μg/mL) followed by a 2h incubation with 200μM H 2 O 2 elevated the survival rate, cutted the LDH leakage, reduced lipid peroxidation damage, improved the activity of the endogenous antioxidant enzymes. In addition, the pretreatment of DOP-GY significantly inhibited the production of ROS, declined of the mitochondrial membrane potential, down-regulated pro-apoptosis protein and up-regulated anti-apoptosis protein. The protective effect was correlated with the PI3K/Akt and MAPK signal pathway. Collectively, these observations suggest that DOY-GY has the potential to exert cardioprotective effects against H 2 O 2 -induced H9c2 cardiomyocyte apoptosis. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Cimentaciones actuales de los rascacielos de Chicago

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López Ruiz, Álvaro

1972-05-01

Full Text Available The main characteristics of the land and the supporting rock are given, and the pattern of present performance of Chicago's deep foundations is briefly described. This city probably has some of the highest skyscrapers in the world with deep foundations resting on rock, and possibly as well, the highest building with foundations resting on soil. The construction of piles of large diameter, resting on rock and concreted dry, as prescribed by the City Code, is the weak point which sometimes makes it necessary to insert a permanent lining tube deep into the rock in order to obtain the required leaktightness, or to pump out significant quantities of water from the bottom of the excavations. The latter can cause the dragging away of earth from adjacent foundations resting on soil at a higher level, as with the drift of the phreatic level, with the consequent risk of producing appreciable subsidence, and even undermining. To overcome this problem we carried out for the first time in Chicago, a pre-sealing, by means of chemical injections, of the supporting rock of the periphery piles of some deep foundations, by drilling into the centre of each pile, which has also been useful as a means of examining the subsoil before proceeding to the perforation of each pile. This operation was carried out on the large diameter piles of the foundations of the Northern Trust Bank skyscraper, at present under construction, with very satisfactory results. The method of pre-sealing the rock used and the results obtained are described.Se presentan las características principales del terreno y de la roca de apoyo y se describe someramente la forma de ejecución actual de las cimentaciones profundas de Chicago. Esta ciudad tendrá (en breve varios de los rascacielos más altos del mundo apoyados en cimentaciones profundas sobre roca y, posiblemente, también el edificio más alto apoyado sobre suelo. La construcción de pilotes de gran diámetro apoyados sobre roca y

Study of wind-induced vibrations in tall buildings with tuned mass dampers taking into account vortices effects

Science.gov (United States)

Momtaz, Ali Ajilian; Abdollahian, Mohamadreza Akhavan; Farshidianfar, Anooshiravan

2017-12-01

In recent years, construction of tall buildings has been of great interest. Use of lightweight materials in such structures reduces stiffness and damping, making the building more influenced by wind loads. Moreover, tall buildings of more than 30 to 40 stories, depending on the geographical location, the wind effects are more influential than earthquakes. In addition, the complexity of the effects of wind flow on the structure due to the interaction of the fluid flow and solid body results in serious damages to the structure by eliminating them. Considering the importance of the issue, the present study investigates the phenomenon of wind-induced vibration on high-rise buildings, taking into account the effects of vortices created by the fluid flow and the control of this phenomenon. To this end, the governing equations of the structure, the fluid flow and the tuned mass damper (TMD) are first introduced, and their coefficient values are extracted according to the characteristics of ACT skyscraper in Japan. Then, these three coupled equations are solved using a program coded in MATLAB. After validation of the results, the effects of wind loads are analyzed and considered with regard to the effects of vortices and the use of TMD, and are compared with the results of the state where no vortices are considered. Generally, the results of this study point out the significance of vibrations caused by vortices in construction of engineering structures as well as the appropriate performance of a TMD in reducing oscillations in tall buildings.

Witco's Toller leaps into Europe and beyond

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Plishner, E.S.

1993-01-01

We're growing into a different culture, says Witco CEO William R. Toller. He's sitting in his office in a New York City skyscraper, but he has already announced that the company will be trading in its urban high-rise headquarters for more flexible facilities in a leafy suburban venue. It is only a few months since the company closed on a major acquisition: Schering AG's natural substances and industrial chemicals businesses. With acquired sales of almost $600 million/year, including 40% in the US that move more than doubled Witco's non-US revenues. On the petroleum side, Newton E. Brightwell III, 44, from Sonneborn, will be v.p./petroleum specialties - including white oils, petrolatums, and sulfonates - in the US, Canada, and the Netherlands. Harvey L. Golubock, 50, will take charge of lubricants as group v.p., including Kendall and Amalie. Robert J. Seward, 60, will be v.p. for the diversifed group, including battery parts, Concarb, Chemprene, and Allied-Kelite. Gulley calls the diversified group a for sale sign. These businesses will remain somewhat independent of the new product-line structure. One way Toller plans to emphasize customer support is by ratcheting up development spending. We acquired over 40 Ph.D.s with Schering, Toller boasts. Some of these brains are reportedly working on metallocene catalysts for polyolefin production - the hot development area in the polymers field. Excluding Shering, Witco has been spending only about 3.5% of sales on R ampersand D, according to Gulley, while the businesses acquired from Schering have been investing about 9.0%

“Here Be Dragons:” The Tyranny of the Cityscape in James Baldwin’s Intimate Cartographies

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Emma Cleary

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The skyline of New York projects a dominant presence in the works of James Baldwin—even those set elsewhere. This essay analyzes the socio-spatial relationships and cognitive maps delineated in Baldwin’s writing, and suggests that some of the most compelling and intense portrayals of New York’s psychogeographic landscape vibrate Baldwin’s text. In The Price of the Ticket (1985, Baldwin’s highly personalized accounts of growing up in Harlem and living in New York map the socio-spatial relationships at play in domestic, street, and blended urban spaces, particularly in the title essay, “Dark Days,” and “Here Be Dragons.” Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country (1962, outlines a multistriated vision of New York City; its occupants traverse the cold urban territory and struggle beneath the jagged silhouette of skyscrapers. This essay examines the ways in which Baldwin composes the urban scene in these works through complex image schemas and intricate geometries, the city’s levels, planes, and perspectives directing the movements of its citizens. Further, I argue that Baldwin’s dynamic use of visual rhythms, light, and sound in his depiction of black life in the city, creates a vivid cartography of New York’s psychogeographic terrain. This essay connects Baldwin’s mappings of Harlem to an imbricated visual and sonic conception of urban subjectivity, that is, how the subject is constructed through a simultaneous and synaesthetic visual/scopic and aural/sonic relation to the city, with a focus on the movement of the body through city space.

Modelling of energy consumption at construction of high-rise buildings

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Korol Elena

2018-01-01

Full Text Available High-rise building structures in the course of its erection suppose primary use of methods provided for erection, concrete and external finishing works. Erection works do not differ significantly from usual ones: traditional equipment, accessories and techniques are used which are based on erection of structures in project position using a crane. Structures to be assembled in building frame include steel columns and beams, wall panels, form elements of columns, walls and floor structures. We can note heightened attention to operational control for quality of erection, but it is attributable to all works in the course of high-rise construction. During high-rise erection by means of cast in-situ reinforced concrete all formworks to be used do not have any special differences except systems specially designed for high-rise erection using sliding formwork or vertical traveling forms. In these systems special attention is paid to safety of elevated works. Working methods of placement and curing of concrete and structures as a whole remain traditional – the requirements for controlling such operations become toughened. The most evident differences in high-rise erection with regard to equipment, machinery and accessories used are in means provided for load transportation and safety of works at heights. Particularity of internal finishing works which are also obligatory during construction of skyscrapers allows not considering them in as technological differences from usual construction as far as the «height» of its execution is limited by height of particular floor and determined by price and building class.

Modelling of energy consumption at construction of high-rise buildings

Science.gov (United States)

Korol, Elena; Korol, Oleg

2018-03-01

High-rise building structures in the course of its erection suppose primary use of methods provided for erection, concrete and external finishing works. Erection works do not differ significantly from usual ones: traditional equipment, accessories and techniques are used which are based on erection of structures in project position using a crane. Structures to be assembled in building frame include steel columns and beams, wall panels, form elements of columns, walls and floor structures. We can note heightened attention to operational control for quality of erection, but it is attributable to all works in the course of high-rise construction. During high-rise erection by means of cast in-situ reinforced concrete all formworks to be used do not have any special differences except systems specially designed for high-rise erection using sliding formwork or vertical traveling forms. In these systems special attention is paid to safety of elevated works. Working methods of placement and curing of concrete and structures as a whole remain traditional - the requirements for controlling such operations become toughened. The most evident differences in high-rise erection with regard to equipment, machinery and accessories used are in means provided for load transportation and safety of works at heights. Particularity of internal finishing works which are also obligatory during construction of skyscrapers allows not considering them in as technological differences from usual construction as far as the «height» of its execution is limited by height of particular floor and determined by price and building class.

Performance of Modular Prefabricated Architecture: Case Study-Based Review and Future Pathways

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Fred Edmond Boafo

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Even though tightened building energy efficiency standards are implemented periodically in many countries, existing buildings continually consume a momentous quota of the total primary energy. Energy efficiency solutions range from material components to bulk systems. A technique of building construction, referred to as prefabricated architecture (prefab, is increasing in reputation. Prefab encompasses the offsite fabrication of building components to a greater degree of finish as bulk building structures and systems, and their assembly on-site. In this context, prefab improves the speed of construction, quality of architecture, efficiency of materials, and worker safety, while limiting environmental impacts of construction, as compared to conventional site-built construction practices. Quite recently, a 57 story skyscraper was built in 19 days using prefabricated modules. From the building physics point of view, the bulk systems and tighter integration method of prefab minimizes thermal bridges. This study seeks to clearly characterize the levels of prefab and to investigate the performance of modular prefab; considering acoustic constrain, seismic resistance, thermal behavior, energy consumption, and life cycle analysis of existing prefab cases and, thus, provides a dynamic case study-based review. Generally, prefab can be categorized into components, panels (2D, modules (3D, hybrids, and unitized whole buildings. On average, greenhouse gas emissions from conventional construction were higher than for modular construction, not discounting some individual discrepancies. Few studies have focused on monitored data on prefab and occupants’ comfort but additional studies are required to understand the public’s perception of the technology. The scope of the work examined will be of interest to building engineers, manufacturers, and energy experts, as well as serve as a foundational reference for future study.

Old Objects in a Futuristic World: Re-Imagining Hong Kong through Its Clock Tower in the Eyes of Western Settlers and Local Citizens

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Catherine S. Chan

2015-06-01

Full Text Available In postcards, on government websites, and in the pages of travel guides, Hong Kong is commonly presented as a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city, marked by a skyline defined by skyscrapers and blinding lights. Millions of tourists visit the city each year to be awed by the highly modern spectacle of Asia’s financial hub. Walking through the streets of Hong Kong, another story emerges: the city celebrates hybridity like no other, incorporating East and West as colonial buildings coexist with the aroma of dried mushrooms from a nearby shop and folk statues are seen on street corners dominated by modern commercial and administrative buildings. However, such multiplicity does not come without a price, especially in a city that struggles to house seven million residents while facing a land shortage and being on the receiving end of a continuous explosion of people from mainland China since the 1990s. In this context, soaring land prices and pressure to make ends meet have long resulted in a neglect of the past. Historical buildings and familiar streetscapes come and go as quickly as trends sweep the city. The clock tower at Tsim Sha Tsui is one example of Hong Kong’s many forgotten legacies: although it has stood at its current location for a century, few have found meaning in its presence. This essay hopes to bring forth the life and times of this architectural structure, highlighting both change and continuity in order to unearth the clock tower’s history from under the city’s countless transformations over the course of one century under British administration....

Selling America: How Post-Recession Ads Told Americans the Story of Themselves

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Adriana Mariella

2017-09-01

Full Text Available This work argues that after the recession in 2007, a kaleidoscope of similar themes about industrial Americana and the beauty of work came to dominate representations of “Americanness” in advertising and pop culture. Brands like Levi’s, Walmart, and Chrysler depended on the careful overlaying of collective imagination with existent myths about work, class, and grit, to create a distinct picture of America’s industrial past and establish themselves as part of its heritage. In doing so, they helped populate American culture with a hegemonic sense of national identity. They depicted an America built from greasy hands on Rust Belt factory floors, “summed up” (as Jameson or Barthes might put it in whiskey, grit, and the frontier, in skyscrapers and pick up trucks. In turn, this reconstructed past helped inform an understanding of what made America, America and the things that would keep it that way: labor, hard work, “making.” In a post-industrial economy where widespread anxiety about industrial decline helped wage a Presidential campaign on promises to restore America to its former industrial glory, the stakes for remembering our past in this way are particularly high. To better understand how our past came to be remembered in this way, I look to modern culture’s blurred lines between entertainment and advertising, memory and fact, identity and myth, a phenomenon that has allowed advertising to disguise itself as historical fact and embed itself in collective memory. In capitalizing (quite literally on anxieties of the modern moment to appeal to traditional American notions, it is able to reinforce and re-invent them in the process.

Hong Kong: country profile.

Science.gov (United States)

Fozzard, A

1988-09-01

In the 1840s, the small fishing community that is now Hong Kong became a British colony and an important naval base for the Opium Wars. Now it is a leading capitalist center operating on mainland communist China. Hong Kong is scheduled to go back to China in 1997. In the agreement signed between the British government and China, Hong Kong's present lifestyle is guaranteed for at least 50 years. Textbook colonialism rules here. Foreigners hold the key jobs and earn much more than do the indigenous people. They even receive subsidized housing in this very high rent colony. As for the Hong Kong Chinese, overcrowding into 2 room apartments is the norm even though the government tries to provide more housing units. The large skyscrapers in the New Territories breed their unique social and mental health problems, such as poverty, drug abuse and frustration. Essentially all food is imported from communist China, yet agriculture in Hong Kong does exist--pig farms, duck lakes, and fields of the popular vegetable choi sum. Major industry comprise textiles and sweat shops which pay their workers (mostly illegal immigrants and children with no legal protection) wages that are 1/4 of those paid in Great Britain. Financial services, trade, and tourism may soon dominate Hong Kong's economy. Almost 4 million tourists visit Hong Kong yearly, often looking for bargains. Despite Hong Kong's active Western-like business climate, Chinese culture still abounds. Traditional incense burns in Buddhist temples. Snake soup is served in restaurants. Plus traditional medicine practiced alongside Western medicine contributes to Hong Kong having 1 of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world (9/1000) and to its high life expectancy of 76 years.

Long-Term Land Subsidence Monitoring of Beijing (China Using the Small Baseline Subset (SBAS Technique

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Bo Hu

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Advanced techniques of multi-temporal InSAR (MT-InSAR represent a valuable tool in ground subsidence studies allowing remote investigation of the behavior of mass movements in long time intervals by using large datasets of SAR images covering the same area and acquired at different epochs. Beijing is susceptible to subsidence, producing undesirable environmental impacts and affecting dense population. Excessive groundwater withdrawal is thought to be the primary cause of land subsidence, and rapid urbanization and economic development, mass construction of skyscrapers, highways and underground engineering facilities (e.g., subway are also contributing factors. In this paper, a spatial–temporal analysis of the land subsidence in Beijing was performed using one of the MT-InSAR techniques, referred to as Small Baseline Subset (SBAS. This technique allows monitoring the temporal evolution of a deformation phenomenon, via the generation of mean deformation velocity maps and displacement time series from a data set of acquired SAR images. 52 C-band ENVISAT ASAR images acquired from June 2003 to August 2010 were used to produce a linear deformation rate map and to derive time series of ground deformation. The results show that there are three large subsidence funnels within this study area, which separately located in Balizhuang-Dajiaoting in Chaoyang district, Wangjing-Laiguangying Chaoyang district, Gaoliying Shunyi district. The maximum settlement center is Wangsiying-Tongzhou along the Beijing express; the subsidence velocity exceeds 110 mm/y in the LOS direction. In particular, we compared the achieved results with leveling measurements that are assumed as reference. The estimated long-term subsidence results obtained by SBAS approach agree well with the development of the over-exploitation of ground water, indicating that SBAS techniques is adequate for the retrieval of land subsidence in Beijing from multi-temporal SAR data.

LIVERPOOL @ SHANGHAI, The waterfront as a brandscape in Liverpool Waters case study

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Anna Attademo

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Liverpool was an important maritime since the 18th century. In the 20th century this economic model declined and the waterfront started shrinking, eroding the core centre of the city. Since then Liverpool administration started stimulating new investments: the symbolic marine backgrounds, central places for the city of production, were turned into city of consumption benchmarks. Transforming into a brandscape the old waterscape perspective, Liverpool creates a twin-city relationship with Shanghai (China, trying to attract new investors from China to accelerate the regeneration. With the "One city, Nine towns" plan (2001, Shanghai provided itself of a branding strategy and of an efficacious urban planning perspective all at one time, using well-known European styles to realize its expansion areas along the waterfront.Working on this model, Liverpool Waters proposal re-designs the waterfront skyline in a Shanghai style, with disproportionate towers, refusing the city waterscape heritage, listed as World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The main landmark of the area, a skyscraper called Shanghai Tower, is not an attempt to embody Shanghai culture or urban environment, but rather to line up to its lifestyle and social-economic conditions, to put the city onto the global market with a positive etiquette.The overall proposal establishes a generic relation with water, neglecting Liverpool marine heritage, moving the attention from the old waterscape (with its core in the historic Pier Head to a new town brandscape. The entire city dematerializes itself on the back of the proposed new picture.The paper tries to evaluate the parallelism in this approach to branding strategies and related regeneration actions, according also to an analytical verification through a project: the proposal for a new tower in Shanghai waterfront to create a balance between the proposition of a successful, vibrant brandscape and the respect of geographical and historical factors.

Heavy metals contamination of soil and fodder: a possible risk to livestock

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ahmad, K.; Shaheen, M.; Khan, Z.I.

2013-01-01

Heavy metals are significant ecological pollutant, principally in areas with sky-scraping anthropogenic stress. Their existence in the environment, soil and water, still in traces can cause severe tribulations to all organisms; heavy metal bioaccumulation in the food chain particularly can be extremely hazardous to animal and human health. Heavy metals generally come into the body by breathing and eating, ingestion being the most important route of contact to these elements in animals. The current study was conducted to examine lead (Pb), cadmium (Cd) and chromium (Cr) in the soil and fodders. Representative samples of soil were collected during two different seasons from two different sites, known as feeding sites for ruminants and analysed for heavy metals after wet digestion, using Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer. The results showed that location and season had a significant effect (P>0.001) on soil and heavy metal concentrations. Soil and forage Pb, Cd, and Cr concentrations were higher in summer than in winter. From the results of the current study, it was determined that all the metals in soil were lower than deadly levels, posing no probable threat to both plant and animal life. There is an incessant need for monitoring the bioavailability of these heavy metals to grazing livestock, principally in summer season when these metals were found in relatively elevated concentrations, so that their possible toxic consequence to the grazing livestock can not be permitted. Agronomic practices, such as, manure and water managements as well as crop alternation system, can affect bioavailability and crop accretion of heavy metals, thus influencing the thresholds for assessing nutritional toxicity of heavy metals in the foodstuff. This study would be important for livestock owners and scientists working in extension services in Pakistan and other countries with same ecological condition. (author)

Sandscape - engaging people in Met Office science through sand sculpture

Science.gov (United States)

Liggins, Felicity; Dowell, Ellen; Wardley, Jamie; Jamieson, Claire

2017-04-01

In 2015, the Met Office's award-winning outreach programme, designed to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, delivered one of its most ambitious and creative activities to date. It explored how scientists and artists can come together to create an engaging experience for young people and families. This activity was called Sandscape. Sandscape is an interactive sand sculpture workshop exploring how weather and climate affect our health. Budding sand sculptors are shown how to fashion elaborate structures from sand and water - creating a landscape with bridges, skyscrapers, forests and factories. As they work, participants are encouraged by the scientists delivering the activity to reflect on what makes a healthy city, considering how the natural and built environments influence air quality and circulation and how this impacts our health. Topics discussed include urban heat islands, air pollution and dispersion modelling, pollen forecasting and predicting the wind-borne spread of animal diseases. Each hour long workshop culminates in a dramatic demonstration that uses dry ice to represent clean air circulating from mountains, along rivers and into cities. Here we present an overview of Sandscape, identify the strengths and challenges of such a collaborative, innovative and playful approach to public engagement and share the results of our evaluation. Sandscape was originally supported by the Met Office and the Wellcome Trust, and produced by Einstein's Garden in collaboration with the Met Office, scientists from the University of Exeter and sand sculptors from Sand in Your Eye. It was first presented in Einstein's Garden at Green Man festival 2015, an independent music and arts festival held annually in Wales, and has since been invited to run at the 2015 Bournemouth Arts By the Sea Festival and Teignmouth's TRAIL Sculpture Festival in the summer of 2016.

How tall buildings affect turbulent air flows and dispersion of pollution within a neighbourhood.

Science.gov (United States)

Aristodemou, Elsa; Boganegra, Luz Maria; Mottet, Laetitia; Pavlidis, Dimitrios; Constantinou, Achilleas; Pain, Christopher; Robins, Alan; ApSimon, Helen

2018-02-01

The city of London, UK, has seen in recent years an increase in the number of high-rise/multi-storey buildings ("skyscrapers") with roof heights reaching 150 m and more, with the Shard being a prime example with a height of ∼310 m. This changing cityscape together with recent plans of local authorities of introducing Combined Heat and Power Plant (CHP) led to a detailed study in which CFD and wind tunnel studies were carried out to assess the effect of such high-rise buildings on the dispersion of air pollution in their vicinity. A new, open-source simulator, FLUIDITY, which incorporates the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) method, was implemented; the simulated results were subsequently validated against experimental measurements from the EnFlo wind tunnel. The novelty of the LES methodology within FLUIDITY is based on the combination of an adaptive, unstructured, mesh with an eddy-viscosity tensor (for the sub-grid scales) that is anisotropic. The simulated normalised mean concentrations results were compared to the corresponding wind tunnel measurements, showing for most detector locations good correlations, with differences ranging from 3% to 37%. The validation procedure was followed by the simulation of two further hypothetical scenarios, in which the heights of buildings surrounding the source building were increased. The results showed clearly how the high-rise buildings affected the surrounding air flows and dispersion patterns, with the generation of "dead-zones" and high-concentration "hotspots" in areas where these did not previously exist. The work clearly showed that complex CFD modelling can provide useful information to urban planners when changes to cityscapes are considered, so that design options can be tested against environmental quality criteria. Crown Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Vestiti d’alta moda, ossature prêt-à-porter: trends strutturali per il grattacielo contemporaneo\\ud (Haute Couture claddings, prêt-à-porter structures: new structural trends for the contemporary skyscraper)

OpenAIRE

Cardellicchio, Luciano

2012-01-01

According with 2011 report of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, high-rises buildings developments have been rapidly increasing worldwide. Presenting the impossibility to compile a new classification for the primary structural system, this paper reviews the evolution of tall-building’s structural systems. While most representative structural system are discussed, the emphasis in this review paper is on current trends such as outrigger systems and diagrid structures. Learning fro...

EDITORIAL: Special issue containing papers presented at the 11th IAEA Technical Meeting on Energetic Particles in Magnetic Confinement Systems Special issue containing papers presented at the 11th IAEA Technical Meeting on Energetic Particles in Magnetic Confinement Systems

Science.gov (United States)

Kolesnichenko, Ya.

2010-08-01

The history of fusion research resembles the way in which one builds skyscrapers: laying the first foundation stone, one thinks about the top of the skyscraper. At the early stages of fusion, when it became clear that the thermonuclear reactor would operate with DT plasma confined by the magnetic field, the study of the `top item'—the physics of 3.5 MeV alpha particles produced by the DT fusion reaction—was initiated. The first publications on this topic appeared as long ago as the 1960s. At that time, because the physics of alpha particles was far from the experimental demand, investigations were carried out by small groups of theoreticians who hoped to discover important and interesting phenomena in this new research area. Soon after the beginning of the work, theoreticians discovered that alpha particles could excite various instabilities in fusion plasmas. In particular, at the end of the 1960s an Alfvén instability driven by alpha particles was predicted. Later it turned out that a variety of Alfvén instabilities with very different features does exist. Instabilities with perturbations of the Alfvénic type play an important role in current experiments; it is likely that they will affect plasma performance in ITER and future reactors. The first experimental manifestation of instabilities excited by superthermal particles in fusion devices was observed in the PDX tokamak in 1983. In this device a large-scale instability—the so called `fishbone instability'—associated with ions produced by the neutral beam injection resulted in a loss of a large fraction of the injected energy. Since then, the study of energetic-ion-driven instabilities and the effects produced by energetic ions in fusion plasmas has attracted the growing attention of both experimentalists and theorists. Recognizing the importance of this topic, the first conference on fusion alpha particles was held in 1989 in Kyiv under the auspices of the IAEA. The meeting in Kyiv and several

Analysis of Secular Ground Motions in Istanbul from a Long-Term InSAR Time-Series (1992–2017

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Gokhan Aslan

2018-03-01

Full Text Available The identification and measurement of ground deformations in urban areas is of great importance for determining the vulnerable parts of the cities that are prone to geohazards, which is a crucial element of both sustainable urban planning and hazard mitigation. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR time series analysis is a very powerful tool for the operational mapping of ground deformation related to urban subsidence and landslide phenomena. With an analysis spanning almost 25 years of satellite radar observations, we compute an InSAR time series of data from multiple satellites (European Remote Sensing satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2, Envisat, Sentinel-1A, and its twin sensor Sentinel-1B in order to investigate the spatial extent and rate of ground deformation in the megacity of Istanbul. By combining the various multi-track InSAR datasets (291 images in total and analysing persistent scatterers (PS-InSAR, we present mean velocity maps of ground surface displacement in selected areas of Istanbul. We identify several sites along the terrestrial and coastal regions of Istanbul that underwent vertical ground subsidence at varying rates, from 5 ± 1.2 mm/yr to 15 ± 2.1 mm/yr. The results reveal that the most distinctive subsidence patterns are associated with both anthropogenic factors and relatively weak lithologies along the Haramirede valley in particular, where the observed subsidence is up to 10 ± 2 mm/yr. We show that subsidence has been occurring along the Ayamama river stream at a rate of up to 10 ± 1.8 mm/yr since 1992, and has also been slowing down over time following the restoration of the river and stream system. We also identify subsidence at a rate of 8 ± 1.2 mm/yr along the coastal region of Istanbul, which we associate with land reclamation, as well as a very localised subsidence at a rate of 15 ± 2.3 mm/yr starting in 2016 around one of the highest skyscrapers of Istanbul, which was built in 2010.

The Power of Spectacle

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Anna Greenspan

2012-01-01

Full Text Available When people say Shanghai looks like the future the setting is almost always the same. Evening descends and the skyscrapers clustered on the eastern shore of the Huangpu light up. Super towers are transformed into giant screens. The spectacular skyline, all neon and lasers and LED, looms as a science fiction backdrop. Staring out from the Bund, across to Pudong, one senses the reemergence of what JG Ballard once described as an ”electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world.” The high-speed development of Pudong – in particular the financial district of Lujiazui – is the symbol of contemporary Shanghai and of China’s miraculous rise.Yet, Pudong is also taken as a sign of much that is wrong with China’s new urbanism. To critics the sci-fi skyline is an emblem of the city’s shallowness, which focuses all attention on its glossy facade. Many share the sentiment of free market economist Milton Friedman who, when visiting Pudong famously derided the brand new spectacle as a giant Potemkin village. Nothing but “the statist monument for a dead pharaoh,” he is quoted as saying.This article explores Pudong in order to investigate the way spectacle functions in China’s most dynamic metropolis. It argues that the skeptical hostility towards spectacle is rooted in the particularities of a Western philosophical tradition that insists on penetrating the surface, associating falsity with darkness and truth with light.In contrast, China has long recognized the power of spectacle (most famously inventing gunpowder but using it only for fireworks. Alongside this comes an acceptance of a shadowy world that belongs to the dark. This acknowledgment of both darkness and light found in traditional Chinese culture (expressed by the constant revolutions of the yin/yang symbol may provide an alternative method for thinking about the tension between the spectacular visions of planners and the unexpected and shadowy disruptions from

El atrio como estrategia estructural en nuevos rascacielos que renuncian a la verticalidad: casos de estudio

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cámara, M.

2013-12-01

Full Text Available In the last decade, a new type of high rise building has been emerging. They are leaning or undulating skyscrapers which become real architectural icons by defying the building logic that the preservation of the vertical line implies. The acceptance of this last aspect is making emerge several works of this kind signed by some of the most influential architectural firms in the world. But, do these new involve works new structural concepts or strategies that answer to their singular characters? Here, the structural solution of two examples is analyzed to identify those contributions with a structural/architectural nature that could became a base for the development of this type. The use of the atrium is recognized as one of them. An assessment based on models of its influence on the structural behavior of leaning towers is carried out.En la última década, ha venido emergiendo un nuevo tipo de edificio en altura. Se trata de rascacielos inclinados u ondulados que, desafiando toda la lógica edificatoria que supone la conservación de la verticalidad, se convierten en auténticos hitos e iconos arquitectónicos. El reconocimiento de este último aspecto está conduciendo a la emergencia de varias representaciones de este tipo respaldadas por algunos de los estudios de arquitectura más influyentes del panorama internacional. Pero, ¿vienen estas actuaciones acompañadas de nuevos conceptos o estrategias estructurales o de diseño que respondan a la singularidad que las caracteriza? Se analiza aquí la solución estructural de dos ejemplos para identificar aquellas aportaciones de carácter estructural/arquitectónico que apuntan a servir de base para el desarrollo del tipo. Reconociéndose la utilización del atrio como una de ellas, se lleva a cabo una evaluación basada en modelos de su influencia en el comportamiento estructural de torres inclinadas.

Stability Evaluation of Buildings in Urban Area Using Persistent Scatterer Interfometry -Focused on Thermal Expansion Effect

Science.gov (United States)

Choi, J. H.; Kim, S. W.; Won, J. S.

2017-12-01

The objective of this study is monitoring and evaluating the stability of buildings in Seoul, Korea. This study includes both algorithm development and application to a case study. The development focuses on improving the PSI approach for discriminating various geophysical phase components and separating them from the target displacement phase. A thermal expansion is one of the key components that make it difficult for precise displacement measurement. The core idea is to optimize the thermal expansion factor using air temperature data and to model the corresponding phase by fitting the residual phase. We used TerraSAR-X SAR data acquired over two years from 2011 to 2013 in Seoul, Korea. The temperature fluctuation according to seasons is considerably high in Seoul, Korea. Other problem is the highly-developed skyscrapers in Seoul, which seriously contribute to DEM errors. To avoid a high computational burden and unstable solution of the nonlinear equation due to unknown parameters (a thermal expansion parameter as well as two conventional parameters: linear velocity and DEM errors), we separate a phase model into two main steps as follows. First, multi-baseline pairs with very short time interval in which deformation components and thermal expansion can be negligible were used to estimate DEM errors first. Second, single-baseline pairs were used to estimate two remaining parameters, linear deformation rate and thermal expansion. The thermal expansion of buildings closely correlate with the seasonal temperature fluctuation. Figure 1 shows deformation patterns of two selected buildings in Seoul. In the figures of left column (Figure 1), it is difficult to observe the true ground subsidence due to a large cyclic pattern caused by thermal dilation of the buildings. The thermal dilation often mis-leads the results into wrong conclusions. After the correction by the proposed method, true ground subsidence was able to be precisely measured as in the bottom right figure

Structural Verification of the First Orbital Wonder of the World - The Structural Testing and Analysis of the International Space Station (ISS)

Science.gov (United States)

Zipay, John J.; Bernstein, Karen S.; Bruno, Erica E.; Deloo, Phillipe; Patin, Raymond

2012-01-01

The International Space Station (ISS) can be considered one of the structural engineering wonders of the world. On par with the World Trade Center, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Pyramids, the Petronas towers and the Burj Khalifa skyscraper of Dubai, the ambition and scope of the ISS structural design, verification and assembly effort is a truly global success story. With its on-orbit life projected to be from its beginning in 1998 to the year 2020 (and perhaps beyond), all of those who participated in its development can consider themselves part of an historic engineering achievement representing all of humanity. The structural design and verification of the ISS could be the subject of many scholarly papers. Several papers have been written on the structural dynamic characterization of the ISS once it was assembled on-orbit [1], but the ground-based activities required to assure structural integrity and structural life of the individual elements from delivery to orbit through assembly and planned on-orbit operations have never been totally summarized. This paper is intended to give the reader an overview of some of the key decisions made during the structural verification planning for the elements of the U.S. On-Orbit Segment (USOS) as well as to summarize the many structural tests and structural analyses that were performed on its major elements. An effort is made for this paper to be summarily comprehensive, but as with all knowledge capture efforts of this kind, there are bound to be errors of omission. Should the reader discover any of these, please feel free to contact the principal author. The ISS (Figure 1) is composed of pre-integrated truss segments and pressurized elements supplied by NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency (RSA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Each of these elements was delivered to orbit by a launch vehicle and connected to one another either robotically or

Water dynamics in hardened ordinary Portland cement paste or concrete: from quasielastic neutron scattering.

Science.gov (United States)

Bordallo, Heloisa N; Aldridge, Laurence P; Desmedt, Arnaud

2006-09-14

Portland cement reacts with water to form an amorphous paste through a chemical reaction called hydration. In concrete the formation of pastes causes the mix to harden and gain strength to form a rock-like mass. Within this process lies the key to a remarkable peculiarity of concrete: it is plastic and soft when newly mixed, strong and durable when hardened. These qualities explain why one material, concrete, can build skyscrapers, bridges, sidewalks and superhighways, houses, and dams. The character of the concrete is determined by the quality of the paste. Creep and shrinkage of concrete specimens occur during the loss and gain of water from cement paste. To better understand the role of water in mature concrete, a series of quasielastic neutron scattering (QENS) experiments were carried out on cement pastes with water/cement ratio varying between 0.32 and 0.6. The samples were cured for about 28 days in sealed containers so that the initial water content would not change. These experiments were carried out with an actual sample of Portland cement rather than with the components of cement studied by other workers. The QENS spectra differentiated between three different water interactions: water that was chemically bound into the cement paste, the physically bound or "glassy water" that interacted with the surface of the gel pores in the paste, and unbound water molecules that are confined within the larger capillary pores of cement paste. The dynamics of the "glassy" and "unboud" water in an extended time scale, from a hundred picoseconds to a few nanoseconds, could be clearly differentiated from the data. While the observed motions on the picosecond time scale are mainly stochastic reorientations of the water molecules, the dynamics observed on the nanosecond range can be attributed to long-range diffusion. Diffusive motion was characterized by diffusion constants in the range of (0.6-2) 10(-9) m(2)/s, with significant reduction compared to the rate of diffusion

Preventing and controlling land subsidence in Shanghai -towards more integrated and effective land use and ground water governance in the Yangtze Delta

Science.gov (United States)

Dai, Liping

2016-04-01

The Yangtze Delta, covers 210,700 square kilometers and with 156 million inhabitants (NRDC, 2010; The National Bureau of Statistics, 2011), is one of the areas most severely affected by land subsidence in China. Up to 2012, the area with cumulative subsidence above 200 mm in Yangtze Delta has been closed to 10,000 square kilometers. Shanghai, located at the estuary of the Yangtze River and with a population of 23 million, is the most densely populated city in Yangtze Delta (The National Bureau of Statistics, 2011). Since 1921, the recorded cumulative subsidence has been 200 to 300 mm in the central area of the city (Chai, Shen, Zhu, & Zhang, 2005). Excessive pumping of groundwater is considered to be the leading reason, accounts for nearly 70%, of the city's land subsidence, the weight of skyscrapers and global warming also play hefty roles (30%) (Springer, 2012). Research has shown that the main method to control land subsidence in Shanghai is to prevent groundwater from dropping (Chai, Shen, Zhu, & Zhang, 2005), the city has made great efforts in this regard since 1965 (the beginning of the so-called "control period"), for example, it has been recharging underground water through 121 wells with more than 60,000 tons every day since 2012 (Chinadaily, 2012). It is a huge burden considering the city has been suffering from a shortage of fresh water. In 2013, with the other two provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang in Yangtze Delta, Shanghai signed a delta cooperation agreement on the prevention and control of land subsidence and jointly issued a Prevention and Control Planning on Land Subsidence in Yangtze Delta (2014-2020), which aims to establish a long-effect mechanism in the delta scope. This research aims to analyze and assess the land and groundwater governance arrangements related to land subsidence in the Yangtze Delta in general and Shanghai in specific, in order to develop optimizing adaptation strategies and associated governance arrangements. It examines the

UV Radiation in an Urban Canyon in Southeast Queensland

Science.gov (United States)

McKinley, A. R.; Moore, M. R.; Kimlin, M. G.

2006-12-01

Ultraviolet radiation (UV) has the possibility to both harm and to benefit human beings when unprotected exposure occurs. After receiving small amounts of UV our bodies begin to synthesise vitamin D, which is essential for maintaining healthy bones, however excessive UV exposure can result in a variety of damaging outcomes ranging from sunburn to skin cancer and cataracts. For this reason it is very important to understand the different environments in which people encounter UV so as to better prepare the public to make smart and healthy sun exposure decisions. Each day more and more people are moving into large cities around the world and spending their time inside the urban canyon, however UV measurements are generally taken at scientific stations in open areas or on top of tall buildings, meaning that at times the environmental characteristics measured may not accurately represent those found at street-level in these highly urbanized areas. Urban canyons are home to both very tall buildings and tropospheric air pollution, each of which reduces the amount of UV reaching street-level. This study measured the varying difference between UV measurements taken at street-level and at a standard UV monitoring site on top of a building outside of the urban canyon. Investigation was conducted in the central business district (CBD) of Brisbane, Australia, which models the CBDs of large cities around the world in that it boasts a great number of tall buildings, including many skyscrapers. Data was collected under clear sky conditions at five different street-level sites in the CBD (on either side of two streets running perpendicular to one another (four sites) and in a public square) and then compared to that obtained on the same day at the Queensland University of Technology's Australian Sun and Health Research Laboratory (ASHRL), which is located 2.5 kilometres outside Brisbane's CBD. Minimum erythemal dose (MED) data was collected at each location and it was found that

Indoor Lighting Facilities

Science.gov (United States)

Matsushima, Koji; Saito, Yoshinori; Ichikawa, Shigenori; Kawauchi, Takao; Tanaka, Tsuneo; Hirano, Rika; Tazuke, Fuyuki

According to the statistics on building construction floor area from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the total floor area of building construction started in Japan in 2007 was 160,991 thousand square meters, or 14.8% less than the area of the previous year, and the reduction was the first reduction in the past five years. The office markets in Tokyo and Nagoya were active, as represented by the supplies of skyscrapers, and energy saving measures, such as the adoption of high efficiency lighting equipment, the control for initial stage illuminance, daylight harvesting, and the use of occupancy sensors, were well established. In the field of public construction, including museums, multi-purpose halls, and religious buildings, the total area of the new construction was 10.8% less than the total for the previous year, and this reduction was a continuation of an eleven-year trend. In spaces with high ceiling, the innovation for easy replacement of light sources used with reflection mirror systems and optical fibers was noted. Hospitals adapted to the expectation for improved services in their selection of lighting facilities to improve the residential environment for patients while taking into consideration the needs of the aging population, by their use of devices in corridors to help maintain a continuity of light. In libraries, a pendant system was developed to illuminate both ceilings and book shelves. In the field of theaters and halls, the time limit for repairing existing systems had come for the large facilities that were opened during the theater and hall construction boom of the 1960s through 1980s, and around 26 renovations were done. Almost all the renovations were conversions to intelligent dimming systems and lighting control desks. In the field of stores and commercial facilities, the atmosphere and glitter of the selling floor was produced by new light sources, such as ceramic metal halide lamps and LEDs, which have high

Ageing in civil engineering materials and structures

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Jaeger, Jean-Marc [SETEC TPI, Tour Gamma D 58, quai de la Rapee, 75583 Paris (France)

2005-07-01

SETEC TPI will address the 'Aging' topic of the Dijon Symposium by talking about: aging in civil engineering materials and structures, prevention of aging phenomena, in-operation monitoring of degradations related to aging and compensatory measures required to maintain a good safety level. Works as the Millau viaduct, the EdF skyscraper at La Defense - Paris, the renovation of the Grand Palais of Paris and special structures with Monaco's floating dam as well as the 'number 10' shaped gateway boat at Marseilles are illustrations for the issues discussed. The durability of civil engineering structures has become a major concern for designers. The Millau viaduct is designed for a service life of 120 years, and the Monaco dam for 100 years. Calculation rules have been evolving toward the incorporation of the concept of life cycle, for example, the Eurocodes 2 rules (reinforced concrete). The talk will expose the factors which are being taken into account to delay aging versus structure types. This part will be focused towards materials and corresponding regulations: - Reinforced concrete (coating of reinforcements, opening of cracks, choice of reinforcement types), BAEL and Eurocodes 2 rules; - Frame steel (protection, sacrificial anode), CM66 and Eurocodes 3 rules. New materials will also be mentioned: - Ultra high-performance fiber/concrete, with the example of CERACEM applied at Millau for the covering of the toll area barrier; - Titanium, which is starting to appear in the building trades, as for instance for the Beijing China Opera House shell. The second part of the talk will be devoted to a specific case namely, the 'number 10' shaped gateway bridge, a prestressed concrete structure immersed in the Port of Marseilles, which will be used to illustrate the aging phenomenon in a corrosive environment. We will focus on the types of inspection series performed by the Autonomous Port Authority of Marseilles to check the behavior of

Fluid selection and parametric analysis on condensation temperature and plant height for a thermogravimetric heat pump

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Najafi, Behzad; Obando Vega, Pedro; Guilizzoni, Manfredo; Rinaldi, Fabio; Arosio, Sergio

2015-01-01

The Thermogravimetric Heat Pump (TGHP) is a non-conventional system, implementing a reverse cycle, the main difference of which from the usual vapor compression (Rankine) cycle is a quasi-isothermal compression of the working fluid by a high heat capacity carrier fluid. Previous studies showed that employing HFC134a or PF5050 as working fluids may be promising in terms of thermodynamic performance, though the corresponding required plant heights confine its application to tall buildings (from minimum height of 10–12 storeys to skyscrapers). Accordingly, an investigation has been carried out in the present study in order to determine a group of fluids which allow lower heights under the same input conditions. In order to investigate the performance of the system and the required plant height, operation of a 100 kW TGHP has been simulated for 17 different fluids. Accordingly, the corresponding COPs and required heights are determined and based on the achieved COPs, the optimum fluid for each range of building height is selected. The resulting plant heights range from 20 m to nearly 200 m and R245ca is shown to be the most promising fluid for the lowest plant height range. A parametric study is next carried out in order to study the effect of variations in the condensation temperature and the dimensionless plant height on the performance of the system. The obtained results demonstrate that an increase in the former from 313 K to 348 K, for almost all of the analyzed fluids, causes a reduction of around 50% in the COP. It is also shown that, almost independent of the employed fluid, the maximum values of COP are reached for a dimensionless plant height of around 1.8. Moreover, all the analyzed fluids show basically the same COP trend and, at the same operating conditions, the COP values for all fluids are within a 10% range of variation. This leads to the conclusion that the thermophysical properties of the employed fluid mainly influences the required height of

LA PLANTA ÚNICA COMO TIPO RESISTENTE A LA ESCALA / the single plan as a type resistant to scale

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Silvia Colmenares Vilata

2014-05-01

Full Text Available RESUMEN El sistema capitalista ha generado dos de los modelos espaciales de indiferencia funcional más extremos: por un lado, el espacio tecnificado y repetido del edificio de oficinas en altura, encarnado por la ‘planta tipo’ y, por otro, el espacio diáfano y extenso del gran contendor, que responde a la lógica de lo que llamaremos ‘planta única’. En los edificios construidos para la industria automovilística y bélica americana se encuentra el germen de un tipo que servirá de modelo para los nuevos espacios de consumo de bienes y servicios de la ciudad post-industrial. En ella, la identificación del rascacielos con el centro y del contenedor con la periferia sigue vigente, porque la densidad necesaria del primero y la ocupación extensiva del segundo hacen que resulte imposible invertir los términos. Sin embargo, ambos representan el desarrollo estrictamente pragmático de los principios de la ‘planta libre’ como sistema operativo genérico, dando lugar a construcciones de gran tamaño que ponen a prueba la resistencia a la escala del propio tipo. Tomando como referencia la neutralidad característica de la ‘planta única’ el texto analiza el comportamiento frente al cambio de tamaño de sus dos configuraciones complementarias: la gran sala hipóstila y la gran sala diáfana. SUMMARY The capitalist system has generated two of the most extreme spatial models of functional indifference: on the one hand, the technified and repeated space of the high-rise office building, incarnated by the “typical plan” and, on the other, the diaphanous and extensive space of the large container, which responds to the logic of what we will call “single plan”. In the buildings constructed for the American automobile and military industries is the germ of a type that would serve as a model for the new spaces for consumption of goods and services of the post-industrial city. In that city, the identification of the skyscraper with the

Højhuse i Danmark 1950-2010

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rasmus Braad Christensen

2010-11-01

Full Text Available Med udgangspunkt i det moderne højhus' fødsel i det 19. århundredes USA samt fænomenets internationale historie, belyser artiklen højhusets historie og udbredelse i Danmark. Fra velfærdsstatens funktionalistiske boligkolosser i midten af det tyvende århundrede, over 1970'erne og 80'ernes modreaktion og 'småt er godt'-mentalitet til de seneste årtiers individuelle og amerikansk inspireredeprestige-projekter med vartegnsambitioner, sættes den danske udvikling ind i en europæisk kontekst og prioriteret bevidsthedshistorisk forklaringsramme. Siden midten af det tyvende århundrede har erhvervshøjhuse i bycenteret hørt til de mest karakteristiske træk ved storbyers udvikling verden over, men i Danmark er den slags højhuse endnu relativt sjældne. Også i danske byer peger udviklingen i de seneste år dog i retning af flere høje, markante byggerier i eller nær bymidten.Abstract:In recent decades, the distinctive urban setup, with a nucleus dominated by clusters of office towers, has spread to most parts of the world. Economic growth and structural conditions are obviously of fundamental importance for this development, but as the present article shows, the limited construction of such centrally located high-rise buildings in Danish (and European cities may also be put into a framework of history of consciousness. The first modern skyscrapers were erected in American cities in the late 19th Century, but it was not until the middle of the 20th Century that a related, but dissimilar development gained momentum in Europe and Denmark. In Copenhagen, as well as in other European cities, office towers fitted badly into the the maze of streets in the city centres, and they also conflicted with the laws that restricted building heights. Because of the post-war shortage of housing and the rapid economic growth of the 1950s and -60s, the first high-rise buildings in Denmark were built in the mid-1950s in the form of suburban residential towers

Slovene Ethnographic Museum Web Collections

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Miha Špiček

2013-09-01

Full Text Available EXTENDED ABSTRACT:Are you interested in the night view of Ljubljana or in the view on the Ljubljana skyscraper in the 30- ies of the 20th century? What did Cerknica look like in that time? What did a typical alpine house look like? What beds were used fifty years ago? Are you a sports fan interested in the training of Yugoslav athletic team in 1953? Is it true that Anton Codelli and his colleague Leo Poljanec set up the first wireless telegraph station for the company Telefunken in the West African German colony of Togo? What is a Palm Sunday bundle? Is a duel between a woman of Carinthia and Carniola really painted on a wooden bee hive panel? What on earth is an object called »roš«? What chimneys were built on the roofs of the Artiže village? The answers to these unusual questions can be found on the SEM (Slovene Ethnographic Museum website. The SEM documentation comprises numerous collections of photographs which are of interest to ethnologists as well as to the general public. To facilitate the access to them SEM bought the first scanner and started to scan individual photos in 1997. In 2007 SEM continued with systematic digitisation of the most frequently used collections of photos. In 2009 the activities were continued (partly in cooperation with external partners and we joined the Athena EU project. In order to be promoted the entire collections were published on the SEM website and made accessible to a broad audience. The MINOK software enabling the creation of html catalogues was used. As static catalogues were unsuitable for inclusion on the website, a new application using dynamic html was designed to create the gallery view of museum objects and photos, photo slide show, keyword filter, geolocation filter, display of geolocation on a map, and to offer the possibility of advanced searching. The Galerist software was designed by an external partner. It enables html catalogue import, sorting and editing XML files; it is possible to

Desaparición y desvirtuación de la estructura en la obra de Sejima-SANAA = Structure disappearance and transformation in Sejima-SANAA´s work

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aida Gonzalez LLavona

2013-10-01

por Sejima en el año 2000: .Palabras claveestructura, jerarquía, desaparición, desvirtuación, trazado geométricoAbstractAnalyzes two strategies used by Sejima - SANAA to overcome the presence and the dominant role of the load-bearing system: it’s disappearance as a specific system and the reduction of its role as organizer of the whole of the project.The disappearance takes as an example the Flower House, where the supporting role has been transferred to the transparent skin that defines the building perimeter. Reminds previous architectures in which elements such as enclosures and partitions also assumed the bearing of the whole. In the Flower House those elements become transparent. The structure becomes invisible, disappears. Reminds Mies Van der Rohe´s project for one of the Friedrichstrasse skyscraper (1922; to his desire of not requiring pillars, of being hold only with the transparent undulated surfaces of its perimeter.The reduction of its role as organizer of the whole refers to strategies in which specific load-bearing system expressly manifest physically visible, but not exercise-unlike what used- the additional function of organizing the whole, establishing a conditional order subordinating the positions of other systems, enclosures, partitions, furniture ...; role carried out historically derived, among others, of assuming the role of materializing, making it evident, the basic geometric pattern. Is illustrated by three examples: the Home Platform I, in which the supporting structure materialises  the basic geometric order, and becomes the organizer of the whole; Park Café in which supporting structure partially materialises  the basic geometric order, and only partially becomes the organizer of the whole and Zollverein School where  the structure is the only system that does not reflect in any way, the base grid, to the point of view shifted its position

Airborne LIDAR and high resolution satellite data for rapid 3D feature extraction

Science.gov (United States)

Jawak, S. D.; Panditrao, S. N.; Luis, A. J.

2014-11-01

, including skyscrapers and bridges, which were confounded and extracted as buildings. This can be attributed to low point density at building edges and on flat roofs or occlusions due to which LiDAR cannot give as much precise planimetric accuracy as photogrammetric techniques (in segmentation) and lack of optimum use of textural information as well as contextual information (especially at walls which are away from roof) in automatic extraction algorithm. In addition, there were no separate classes for bridges or the features lying inside the water and multiple water height levels were also not considered. Based on these inferences, we conclude that the LiDAR-based 3D feature extraction supplemented by high resolution satellite data is a potential application which can be used for understanding and characterization of urban setup.

The Hydrogen Economy Making the Transition to the Third Industrial Revolution and a New Energy Era

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jeremy Rifkin

2006-01-01

out and produces no harmful CO 2 emissions. Commercial fuel-cells powered by hydrogen are just now being introduced into the market for home, office and industrial use. Hitachi, Toshiba, and other companies will be introducing the first hydrogen fuel cell cartridges into retail stores around the world in 2007. The small hydrogen powered micro fuel cells will replace traditional batteries and provide mobile power for lap-top computers, cell phones, PDA's, Mp3 players, camcorders, portable DVD players, hand- held computers, video games, and digital cameras. With this new energy source, computers can be powered for days at a time, where existing battery technology lasts only a few hours before needing to be plugged back into the wall socket to be recharged. Similarly, manufacturing and service-related companies are just beginning to introduce stationary fuel cell power plants to provide back-up generation during periods of peak load or when the price of electricity on the grid becomes too expensive, or when the grid cannot keep up with demand surges, resulting in rolling brownout and blackouts. Indeed, when the massive 2002 power blackout shut down large parts of the Northeast and Midwestern part of the US and the New York City skyline went black, a newly erected skyscraper in Times Square remained fully lit and powered up because a stationary fuel cell power plant had been built into its infrastructure. The German company, Linde AG, recently introduced a hydrogen fuel cell power plant at the Munich airport. The hydrogen economy makes possible a broad redistribution of power, with far-reaching beneficial consequences for society. In the new era, businesses, municipalities and homeowners could become the producers as well as the consumers of their own energy so-called 'distributed generation'. Even the automobile itself is a 'power station on wheels' with a generating capacity of twenty kilowatts. Since the average car is parked most of the time, it can be plugged in

The Hydrogen Economy Making the Transition to the Third Industrial Revolution and a New Energy Era

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Jeremy Rifkin

2006-07-01

;forever fuel'. It never runs out and produces no harmful CO{sub 2} emissions. Commercial fuel-cells powered by hydrogen are just now being introduced into the market for home, office and industrial use. Hitachi, Toshiba, and other companies will be introducing the first hydrogen fuel cell cartridges into retail stores around the world in 2007. The small hydrogen powered micro fuel cells will replace traditional batteries and provide mobile power for lap-top computers, cell phones, PDA's, Mp3 players, camcorders, portable DVD players, hand- held computers, video games, and digital cameras. With this new energy source, computers can be powered for days at a time, where existing battery technology lasts only a few hours before needing to be plugged back into the wall socket to be recharged. Similarly, manufacturing and service-related companies are just beginning to introduce stationary fuel cell power plants to provide back-up generation during periods of peak load or when the price of electricity on the grid becomes too expensive, or when the grid cannot keep up with demand surges, resulting in rolling brownout and blackouts. Indeed, when the massive 2002 power blackout shut down large parts of the Northeast and Midwestern part of the US and the New York City skyline went black, a newly erected skyscraper in Times Square remained fully lit and powered up because a stationary fuel cell power plant had been built into its infrastructure. The German company, Linde AG, recently introduced a hydrogen fuel cell power plant at the Munich airport. The hydrogen economy makes possible a broad redistribution of power, with far-reaching beneficial consequences for society. In the new era, businesses, municipalities and homeowners could become the producers as well as the consumers of their own energy so-called 'distributed generation'. Even the automobile itself is a 'power station on wheels' with a generating capacity of twenty kilowatts. Since the average