Simulation support for performance assessment of building components

The determination of performance metrics for novel building components requires that the tests are conducted in the outdoor environment. It is usually difficult to do this when the components are located in a full-scale building because of the difficulty in controlling the experiments. Test cells allow the components to be tested in realistic, but controlled, conditions. High-quality outdoor experiments and identification analysis methods can be used to determine key parameters that quantify performance. This is important for achieving standardised metrics that characterise the building component of interest, whether it is a passive solar component such as a ventilated window, or an active component such as a hybrid photovoltaic module. However, such testing and analysis does not determine how the building component will perform when placed in a real building in a particular location and climate. For this, it is necessary to model the whole building with and without the building component of interest. A procedure has been developed, and applied within several major European projects, that consists of calibrating a simulation model with high-quality data from the outdoor tests and then applying scaling and replication to one or more buildings and locations to determine performance in practice of building components. This paper sets out the methodology that has been developed and applied in these European projects. A case study is included demonstrating its application to the performance evaluation of hybrid photovoltaic modules

Comparative performance of airyscan and structured illumination superresolution microscopy in the study of the surface texture and 3D shape of pollen

The visualization of taxonomically diagnostic features of individual pollen grains can be a challenge for many ecologically and phylogenetically important pollen types. The resolution of traditional optical microscopy is limited by the diffraction of light (250 nm), while high resolution tools such as electron microscopy are limited by laborious preparation and imaging workflows. Airyscan confocal superresolution and structured illumination superresolution (SR-SIM) microscopy are powerful new tools for the study of nanoscale pollen morphology and three-dimensional structure that can overcome these basic limitations. This study demonstrates their utility in capturing morphological details below the diffraction limit of light. Using three distinct pollen morphotypes (Croton hirtus, Dactylis glomerata, and Helianthus sp.) and contrast-enhancing fluorescent staining, we were able to assess the effectiveness of the Airyscan and SR-SIM. We further demonstrate that these new superresolution methods can be easily applied to the study of fossil pollen material