Biomimetic Potentials for Building Envelope Adaptation in Egypt

AbstractBiomimicry is a science that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's time-tested 3.8 billion years of patterns and strategies. The paper is concerned with embodying the biomimetic strategies to building envelopes which shall offer a high potential to reduce the energy demand, save material and thus improve the sustainability of buildings, through accessing current practices process of natural ventilation biomimicry in buildings for a potential application in building envelope for environmental adaptation which could help for the emergence of a new generation of biomimetic building envelopes aiming at promoting biomimicry in Egypt by showing the benefits that could be harvested

Izravna i neizravna sterilizacija mikroba plazmom

Atmospheric-pressure parallel-plate dielectric barrier discharge has been designed for sterilization of Saccharomyces Cerevisiae and Candida yeasts. Oxygen has been used as the input working gas. The output gas after discharge operation was a mixture of both ozone and oxygen, with concentration that depends on the applied voltage between the electrodes, gap space and gas flow rate. Sterilization process has been done in two ways, by direct exposure to oxygen plasma inside the discharge cell and by indirect exposure to the plasma. Survivor curves, and scanning and transmission electron microscope were used to study the inactivation kinetics and morphology of the yeast surface before and after sterilization. It has been found that the indirect sterilization causes yeast inactivation in a short time, less than three minutes, while the direct sterilization took place in a longer time, more than ten minutes.Sagradili smo posudu s usporednim pločama i dielektričnom pregradom za postizanje izboja na atmosferskom tlaku, namijenjenu za proučavanje sterilizacije mikroba Saccharomyces Cerevisiae i Candida. Radni plin bio je kisik. Izlazni plin iz posude bio je smjesa ozona i kisika, čija je koncentracija ovisna o vaponu izboja među elektrodama, procijepu i brzini protjecanja plina. Sterilizacija se provodila na dva načina, izravnim izlaganjem u izbojnoj posudi i neizravnim izlaganjem plazmi. Za proučavanje kinetike prekida aktivnosti stanične plazme i oblika mikrobne površine rabili smo krivulje preživjelih stanica prije i poslije sterilizacije. Ustanovili smo da neizravna sterilizacija dovodi do prekida aktivnosti mikroba u kratkom vremenu, manje od tri minute, dok je izravna sterilizacija trajala dulje, više od deset minuta

On Asymptotic Pointwise Contractions in Modular Metric Spaces

In this paper we study and prove some new fixed points theorems for pointwise and asymptotic pointwise contraction mappings in modular metric spaces

Synthesis, spectral characterization, cyclic voltammety, molecular modeling and catalytic activity of sulfa-drug divalent metal complexes

Complexes of cobalt(II), nickel(II), copper(II), zinc(II) and Hafnium(II) of general composition [M(L)2(Cl)2] have been synthesized [L = 4-(phenylphosphinylideneamino-N-thiazolylbenzenesulfonamide]. The elemental analysis, molar conductance measurements, magnetic susceptibility measurements, mass, IR, UV, NMR, SEM, EDX, thermal and EPR spectral studies of the compounds led to the conclusion that the ligand acts as a bidentate manner. The molar conductance of the complexes in fresh solution of DMSO lies in the range of 7.46–9.13 Ω-1 cm2mol‒1 indicating their non-electrolytic behavior. On the basis of analytical and spectroscopic techniques, octahedral geometry of the complexes was proposed. The ligand acts as bidentate ligand, coordinated through sulfonamide oxygen and thiazole nitrogen atoms. The ligand field parameters were calculated for Co(II), Ni(II) and Cu(II) complexes and their values were found in the range reported for a octahedral structure. The catalytic activities of the divalent metal complexes have been studied in the oxidation of cyclohexane, using environmental friendly oxidant, hydrogen peroxide. Complex with rough surface has shown higher catalytic activity compared to the other complexes. The molecular parameters of the ligand and its Co(II) and Hf(II) complexes have been calculated.Â

Combining global and local semantic contexts for improving biomedical information retrieval

Présenté lors de l'European Conference on Information Retrieval 2011International audienceIn the context of biomedical information retrieval (IR), this paper explores the relationship between the document's global context and the query's local context in an attempt to overcome the term mismatch problem between the user query and documents in the collection. Most solutions to this problem have been focused on expanding the query by discovering its context, either \textit{global} or \textit{local}. In a global strategy, all documents in the collection are used to examine word occurrences and relationships in the corpus as a whole, and use this information to expand the original query. In a local strategy, the top-ranked documents retrieved for a given query are examined to determine terms for query expansion. We propose to combine the document's global context and the query's local context in an attempt to increase the term overlap between the user query and documents in the collection via document expansion (DE) and query expansion (QE). The DE technique is based on a statistical method (IR-based) to extract the most appropriate concepts (global context) from each document. The QE technique is based on a blind feedback approach using the top-ranked documents (local context) obtained in the first retrieval stage. A comparative experiment on the TREC 2004 Genomics collection demonstrates that the combination of the document's global context and the query's local context shows a significant improvement over the baseline. The MAP is significantly raised from 0.4097 to 0.4532 with a significant improvement rate of +10.62\% over the baseline. The IR performance of the combined method in terms of MAP is also superior to official runs participated in TREC 2004 Genomics and is comparable to the performance of the best run (0.4075)

Effet de l’arbre Acacia senegal sur la fertilité des sols de gommeraies au Niger

Six gommeraies des trois bassins gommiers du Niger ont été étudiées : Kiki et Kokoiyé dans le bassin gommier occidental, Bader Goula et Azzaî dans le bassin gommier central et Malam Mainari et N’Guel Kolo dans le bassin gommier oriental. L’objectif de l’étude est d’évaluer l’effet d’Acacia senegal sur la fertilité des sols sous et hors houppiers dans ces gommeraies. Les résultats obtenus à travers les paramètres retenus (le pH, le carbone organique (C), l’azote (N), la capacité d’échange cationique (CEC), le phosphore assimilable (P) et la somme des bases échangeables (S) pour appréhender cet effet d’A. senegal sur le sol montrent une amélioration de la teneur en ces éléments dans le sol sous houppier comparativement aux témoins dans la plupart des cas.Mots clés : Acacia senegal, fertilité, sol, gommeraie, Nige

An empirical study of the complexity of requirements management in construction projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate in-depth the current approach of managing client requirements in construction and to highlight the significant factors, which contribute to the complexity of managing the requirements in order to define a better approach. Design/methodology/approach – A case study of a leading international global built asset and engineering consultancy organization was conducted over two years. The case study was conducted principally using semi-participant observations supplemented with other qualitative data collection methods (i.e. interviews, questionnaires and document analysis). Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Findings – The results highlight major factors associated with the complexity of managing client requirements information, which include: mechanisms for documentation, storage and access, distribution of requirements information between stakeholders and across lifecycle phases of a project, traceability management and the provision of effective change management incorporating dependency checking and impact analysis. Research limitations/implications – The main limitation of the research is the use of an in-depth study of a single organization, which applied the same project management method across all the projects they managed. Further work is planned to develop the proposed framework fully, and develop a software platform to operationalize and evaluate its industrial applicability with construction projects. Practical implications – The implications of this research is that a better approach to managing requirements information is needed, which will facilitate the design, construction and operations of buildings within budget and time. An integrated framework and an associated tool are suggested to implement the approach. Originality/value – This study identifies major research gaps and problems in the architecture, engineering, construction and facilities management industry; proposes and presents Electronic Requirements Information Management framework to facilitate lifecycle management of the requirements

An enterprise architecture framework for electronic requirements information management

© 2017 Elsevier LtdManaging information about client requirements effectively can contribute to improve the quality of built facilities, and their related services. However, the process has been challenging to construction project management often resulting in failed projects. This necessitates an overwhelming need for a better approach. This paper presents a novel enterprise architecture framework for managing information about client requirements across all phases of a construction project and through-life of a built facility. The Integrated electronic Requirements Information Management Framework (eRIM) defines an information-centric, and process and service-oriented enterprise architecture approach to requirements management. It also describes how Information and Communication Technology (ICT)/Information Systems (IS) can support this information management. In developing the framework, findings from three case study projects were collated through observations, a questionnaire and interviews of construction practitioners. It is concluded that when implemented and incorporated in the management of construction projects, the eRIM architecture framework can potentially contribute towards improved and more efficient and effective management of client requirements across all stages of a project. Further work is outlined to operationalize the framework