Achieving environmentally friendly building envelope for Western Australia’s housing sector: a Life Cycle Assessment approach

The rapid growth of Western Australia’s population and economy will affect the sustainability of its building sector. The energy consumption of all processes during mining to material production, transportation, construction plant and tools, and operation (heating, cooling, lighting, hot water and home appliances) stages causes high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and embodied energy (EE) consumption. The literature review to date have confirmed that the building envelope consisting of exterior walls, windows, external doors, roof, and floor could significantly affect the energy consumption during operation stage. Australian construction industry could thus enhance the energy efficiency of the building envelope in order to achieve its GHG emissions reduction targets. This paper has assessed the GHG emissions and EE consumption associated with the construction and use of a typical house in Perth for sixty building envelope options using a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. The results show that the building envelope consisting of cast in situ sandwich wall with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) foam core, double glazed windows, and concrete roof tiles has the lowest life cycle GHG emissions and embodied energy consumption

High Efficiency Green Function-Based Thermal Simulation Algorithms

efficient calculations of the temperature distribution corresponding to a specific circuit layout and power density distribution will become indispensable in the design of high performance VLSI circuits. In this paper, we present three highly efficient thermal simulation algorithms for calculating the on-chip temperature distribution in a multilayered substrate structure. All three algorithms are based on the concept of the Green function and utilize the technique of discrete cosine transform (DCT). However, the application areas of the algorithms are different.The first algorithm is suitable for localized analysis in thermal problems, while the second algorithm targets full-chip temperature profiling. The third algorithm, which combines the advantages of the first two algorithms, can be used to perform thermal simulations where the accuracy requirement differs from place to place over the same chip. Experimental results show that all three algorithms can achieve relative errors of around 1 % compared with that of a commercial computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software package for thermal analysis while their efficiencies are orders of magnitude higher than that of the direct application of the Green function method. Index Terms — Simulation, thermal analysis, multilayered substrate, Green function method, discrete cosine transform (DCT), table look-up approach, spectral domain analysis. I

A treatable cause of neuroregression

We report the case of a 13-month-old girl with neuroregression over 3 months and encephalopathy at presentation. Marked skin hyperpigmentation and being exclusively breastfed gave the clue to B12 deficiency secondary to maternal B12 deficiency as the possible etiology which was confirmed on investigation. Upon treatment with parenteral B12 therapy she demonstrated dramatic improvement at follow-up. Nutritional B12 deficiency is an imminently treatable cause of neurocognitive dysfunction. Better awareness, healthy complementary feeding practices in infancy and perhaps maternal B12 supplementation can help prevent this disorder