The selection and development of a project location is critical to the success of a green building project. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is one of the most popular Green Building certification systems in the world. Traditionally in LEED design, architects and designers have to analyze project location based on traditional maps with manual calculations, which require a si...

The atomic structure of the fivefold symmetric quasicrystal surface of icosahedral AlPdMn has been investigated by means of a dynamical low-energy-electron diffraction (LEED) analysis. Approximations were developed to make the structure of an aperiodic, quasicrystalline surface region accessible to LEED theory. A mix of several closely similar, relaxed, bulklike lattice terminations is favored,...

This paper presents ongoing research aimed at investigating the efficacy of computer animations in improving college students’ learning of building sustainability concepts and practices. The use of animations in educational contexts is not new, however scientific evidence that supports their effectiveness as educational materials is still limited. This paper reports an experiment that explored ...

a r t i c l e i n f o Green building rating systems Building performance analyses Today, there is a high level of demand for sustainable buildings. The most important decisions regarding a building's sustainable features are made during the design and preconstruction stages. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED ®) is the most widely adopted sustainable building rating system in t...

In the United States, university buildings use 17% of total non-residential building energy per year. According to the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory), the average lifecycle of a building in a university is 42 years with an EUI (energy use intensity) of 23 kWh/m/y. Current building and energy codes limit the EUI to 16 kWh/m/y for new school buildings; this benchmark can vary dependi...

In cleaning copper surfaces by ion bombardment and annealing, carbon appears very often as a final contaminant which is very difficult to eliminate totally compared with other contaminants (0, S, Cl). Even during ion bombardment, surfaces are easily contaminated by carbon and the degree of contamination depends on the cleaning conditions. The main cause of the contamination may be the decomposi...

Low-energy electron diffraction (LEED), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and X-ray diffraction (XRD) have been used to investigate the structural and morphological character of a naturally chiral ceramic SrTiO3(621) substrate and of Pt and Cu thin films deposited on its surface. AFM experiments showed that as-received chirally-oriented SrTiO3(621) substrates display atomically smooth surface morp...

We present the results of Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) analysis of sulfur-passivating layers on the GaAs (100) surface. The GaAs surfaces were passivated with both inorganic 42x and organic [octadecylthiol (ODT)] S-based compounds. We prepared the inorganic sulfur-passivated GaAs(100) surfaces with a wet chemical tre...