Assessing the Resilience of LEED Certified Green Buildings

The Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) green building certification program is dedicated to the design of sustainable buildings by incentivizing reductions in energy, water, and building materials consumption, while at the same time enhancing occupant health and overall community connectivity. While green buildings certified by the program do reduce the environmental footprint of buildings, they must also be designed for resilience to withstand external stressors that may arise over the buildings’ lifetime for it to be truly sustainable. Therefore, a resilient building should be able to adapt and remain functional while under pressure from more frequent and severe climatic events. The goal of the study was to analyze existing inherent overlaps between resilient design principles and the LEED certification system. Synergistic opportunities together with improvements for better integrating resilient design into the LEED checklist, and hence green buildings, by modifying existing or proposing new credits were discussed. The use of climate projections instead of historical climate data during design was recommended. Regional priority credits need to be specified further to address the unique regional needs of each project to improve resilience in light of a particular region’s future climate outlook

Thermal Equilibration of 176-Lu via K-Mixing

In astrophysical environments, the long-lived (\T_1/2 = 37.6 Gy) ground state of 176-Lu can communicate with a short-lived (T_1/2 = 3.664 h) isomeric level through thermal excitations. Thus, the lifetime of 176-Lu in an astrophysical environment can be quite different than in the laboratory. We examine the possibility that the rate of equilibration can be enhanced via K-mixing of two levels near E_x = 725 keV and estimate the relevant gamma-decay rates. We use this result to illustrate the effect of K-mixing on the effective stellar half-life. We also present a network calculation that includes the equilibrating transitions allowed by K-mixing. Even a small amount of K-mixing will ensure that 176-Lu reaches at least a quasi-equilibrium during an s-process triggered by the 22-Ne neutron source.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Using Information Theoretic Techniques for Sinusoidal Signal Resolution

The objective is to develop information theoT"€tic criteria for detection of sinusoidal signals. The minimum description length (MDL) and the predictive stochastic complexity (PSC) have been formulated for harmonic resolution. MDL and PSC QI" € the codelength for data and model. The proposed techniques are based on decomposing the observation vector into its components in the signal and noise subspaces. Each component is encoded separately and the results are added to form the total codelength. The codelength is minimized over different models to select the best model. Sinusoidal signal detection is applied in various fields ranging from telecommunications to arra

Traffic jams and intermittent flows in microfluidic networks

We investigate both experimentally and theoretically the traffic of particles flowing in microfluidic obstacle networks. We show that the traffic dynamics is a non-linear process: the particle current does not scale with the particle density even in the dilute limit where no particle collision occurs. We demonstrate that this non-linear behavior stems from long range hydrodynamic interactions. Importantly, we also establish that there exists a maximal current above which no stationary particle flow can be sustained. For higher current values, intermittent traffic jams form thereby inducing the ejection of the particles from the initial path and the subsequent invasion of the network. Eventually, we put our findings in the broader context of the transport proccesses of driven particles in low dimension

Direct measurement of the 14N(p,g)15O S-factor

We have measured the 14N(p,g)15O excitation function for energies in the range E_p = 155--524 keV. Fits of these data using R-matrix theory yield a value for the S-factor at zero energy of 1.64(17) keV b, which is significantly smaller than the result of a previous direct measurement. The corresponding reduction in the stellar reaction rate for 14N(p,g)15O has a number of interesting consequences, including an impact on estimates for the age of the Galaxy derived from globular clusters.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let