Over the past few decades, several methods for designing shades to reduce energy loads of buildings have emerged. However, to date there are virtually no agreed upon methods available to assist in the design of outdoor shades to keep people comfortable. Here we present a novel method named ComfortCover to assist in the design of static shades in outdoor conditions using a 3-step methodology ada...

This article presents an optimization methodology for finding the heater settings that provide spatially uniform transient heating in manufacturing processes involving radiant heating. Equations governing the transient temperature and temperature sensitivity distributions over the product are first derived using an infinitesimal-area technique and then solved numerically to calculate the object...

There are several methods of designing an antireflection (AR) coating for a dielectric substrate of refractive index n by depositing one or more nonabsorbing films on it. For example, one approach' is to use only two materials in a coating but to vary the thicknesses of the layers to achieve a filter in which the radiant transmittance vs wavenumber simulates a Chebyshev function. Another approa...

The integrating sphere is a simple, yet often misunderstood spectrophotometer accessory for measuring optical radiation. The function of an integrating sphere is to spatially integrate radiant flux in scatter transmission and diffuse reflectance sample measurements. Before one can optimize a sphere design for a particular application, it is important to understand how the integrating sphere wor...