planning for urban density is one of the most important problems facing contemporary urban planning at both national and universal. urbanized world - that is changing permanently - needs an optimum extent of urban density which can consider both quantitative (efficient use of land and urban infrastructures, reducing energy consumption, etc.) and qualitative requirements (such as providing desir...

As building structures frequently collapse and cause losses of lives and properties, due to excessive vibrations induced during earthquake periods, it is crucial to reduce the structural vibrations. This paper develops a Lyapunov-based controller for Magnetorheological (MR) dampers embedded in building structures to mitigate quake-induced vibrations. In this work, MR dampers are used as semi-ac...

Care homes are not institutions, They are people’s homes. They are not “healthcare establishments”, They provide nursing care as part of a range of personal care services. People living in care homes are not “patients”. People living in care homes have a right to expect clean, safe environments and care. People using a service have the right to make choices, including taking risk. People living...

Moisture content in tidal flats changes frequently and spatially on account of fluctuations, which greatly influence the reflectance flat surface. Precise prediction spatial-temporal variation flats’ moisture is an important foundation surface bio-geophysical information research by remote sensing. In this paper, we first measured multi-angle soil samples obtained from northeastern Dongtai, Jia...

Soft storey buildings are characterized by having a storey which has a lot of open spaces. This soft storey creates a major weak point in an earthquake. Since soft stories are classically associated with retail spaces and parking garages, they are often on the lower stories of a building, which means that when they collapse, they can take the whole building down with them, causing serious struc...

Dwellings should be designed for users' wellbeing but frequently their actions seem to contradict the logic adopted in the design. The impact of users' actions and habits on buildings energy efficiency is well established and documented. However, there is a lack of available information concerning the relationship between user behaviour, building airtightness and ventilation. This paper explore...

The average indoor radon concentration in Finnish flats is 80 Bq/m3. Typically walls have been made using concrete elements. Building materials are the dominant source of indoor radon. However, in the flats of the lowest floor, with a floor slab in direct ground contact, the main source of radon is often the inflow of radon bearing soil air. The number of these ground contact flats is less than...

We present an overview of the methods used to create the flat fields which are currently in use by the ACS calibration pipeline. L-flats for the SBC detector have recently been computed using dithered star cluster observations. Large corrections to the existing flats are required at the 10-20 percent level, depending on wavelength. A comparison with sky flats obtained via observations of the br...

We develop a probabilistic framework for modelling indoor air quality in housing stocks, selecting appropriate sensitivity analyses to understand indoor air quality determinants, and constructing a reliable metamodel from the most relevant determinants to allow quick assessments of future intervention scenarios. The replicated Latin Hypercube sampling method is shown to be efficient at propagat...