The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) at the Pittsburgh Research Laboratory (PRL) is conducting research to reduce the noise exposures of roof bolting machine operators and to prevent additional cases of Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) thru the development of engineering noise controls. This paper describes and evaluates an engineering noise control for the roof bo...

This paper focuses on a field test that locates roof areas with a high solar potential and predicts the solar “harvest” per m. The test analyzes 2.5D LIDAR data provided by official surveying and mapping sources. The primary LIDAR data is prepared by masking the roofs’ contours and afterwards filtering the point cloud by a threshold value. The remaining LIDAR data, which represents the building...

A three dimensional numerical wind tunnel based on the Navier-Stokes equations for viscous, incompressible fluid and LES method is established. Incoming wind field is generated based on the AIJ guidelines (2004). The numerical wind tunnel is validated against experimental results. A low-rise building with green roof is tested in the numerical wind tunnel. The results show that the green roof re...

Green roofs have the potential to function as islands of biodiversity within urban and suburban environments. However, plant diversity is constrained by the harsh environment of a green roof, especially summertime water deficit and heat stress. We hypothesized that Sedum species, which are highly tolerant of the roof-top environment, would reduce peak soil temperature and increase performance o...

With the developments in automobile technologies; more focus is given to the vehicle weight reduction. About 30% weight is contributed by the automobile body. Now-a-days, plastic composites are used to manufacture automobile bodies as they are strong, light, corrosion resistant and easy to use. This paper represents the selection of plastic composites to build vehicle roof as a replacement of c...

This paper proposes a method for the automatic extraction of building roof contours from a LiDAR-derived digital surface model (DSM). The method is based on two steps. First, to detect aboveground objects (buildings, trees, etc.), the DSM is segmented through a recursive splitting technique followed by a region merging process. Vectorization and polygonization are used to obtain polyline repres...

Field studies were conducted on several attic assemblies having stone-coated metal shake roofs with and without infrared blocking color pigments (IrBCPs) and with and without above-sheathing ventilation. The combination of increased solar reflectance and above-sheathing ventilation reduced the heat flow penetrating the attic floor by 70% as compared with the heat flow penetrating the attic floo...

Many different concepts of percolation exist for networks. We show that bond percolation, site percolation, k-core percolation, and bootstrap percolation are all special cases of the Watts Threshold model. We show that the “heterogeneous k-core” and a corresponding heterogeneous bootstrap model are equivalent to one another and the Watts Threshold Model. A more recent model of a “Generalized Ep...

Our recently published data demonstrate significant similarities between normal and malignant plasma cells in the cellular and molecular interactions that support their survival in the bone marrow microenvironment, and suggest that the biology of multiple myeloma may largely reflect that of their normal counterparts.