Shades of Green: Improving the Energy Efficiency and Environmental Impact of Historic Building

The recent dramatic increase in oil prices as well as a growing worldwide concern with climate change has brought renewed attention and interest in energy efficiency and consideration for the environment among all areas of industry, in particular the built environment. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, operational energy consumption in residential and commercial buildings accounted for 40% of total energy consumed in the United States in 2007, and produced nearly 48% of the country\u27s greenhouse gas emissions. While architects have been making their contribution to the environmental cause, designing more efficient buildings with tools such as the U.S. Green Building Council\u27s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, historic preservationists are edging their way into the green movement within a complex set of constraints and guidelines, such as the Secretary of the Interior\u27s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, but equally motivated to reduce the historic building stock\u27s adverse effect on the environment and energy consumption

The size of a Minkowski ellipse that contains the unit ball

In this paper we study the minimum radius of Minkowski ellipses (with antipodal foci on the unit sphere) necessary to contain the unit ball of a (normed or) Minkowski plane. We obtain a general upper bound depending on the modulus of convexity, and in the special case of a so-called symmetric Minkowski plane (a notion that we will recall in the paper) we prove a lower bound, and also we obtain that 3 is the exact upper boun

Phase Rotation, Cooling And Acceleration Of Muon Beams: A Comparison Of Different Approaches

Experimental and theoretical activities are underway at CERN with the aim of examining the feasibility of a very-high-flux neutrino source. In the present scheme, a high-power proton beam (some 4 MW) bombards a target where pions are produced. The pions are collected and decay to muons under controlled optical condition. The muons are cooled and accelerated to a final energy of 50 GeV before being injected into a decay ring where they decay under well-defined conditions of energy and emittance. We present the most challenging parts of the whole scenario, the muon capture, the ionisation-cooling and the first stage of the muon acceleration. Different schemes, their performance and the technical challenges are compared.Comment: LINAC 2000 CONFERENCE, paper ID No. THC1

Thermoeconomic assessment of a spectral-splitting hybrid PVT system in dairy farms for combined heat and power

We investigate the thermoeconomic potential of a solar-combined heat and power (S-CHP) system based on concentrating, spectral-splitting hybrid photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) collectors for the provision of electricity, steam and hot water for processing milk products in dairy applications. Transient simulations are conducted by using a system model with real-time demand and weather data as inputs, taking account of the spectrum-selective features of the PV cells as well as key heat transfer mechanisms that determine the electrical and thermal performance of the PVT collector. Economic performance is also assessed by considering the investment and savings enabled by the reduced electrical and fuel consumption. The results show that incorporating spectral beam-splitting technology into hybrid PVT collectors can be effective in maintaining the PV cells at low temperatures, while at the same time supplying thermal outputs (fluid streams) at temperatures significantly higher than then cell temperatures for steam generation and/or hot water provision. Based on a 15, 000-m2 installed area, it is found that 80% of the thermal demand for steam generation and 60% of the hot water demand can be satisfied by the PVT S-CHP system, along with a net electrical output amounting to 60% of the demand. Economic and environmental assessments show that the system has an excellent decarbonisation potential (1, 500 tCO2/year) and is economically viable if the investment cost of the spectrum splitter is lower than 0.85 of the cost of the parabolic concentrator (i.e., <2, 150 €/m2 spectrum splitter) in this application

Measurement of transverse beam emittance of split beams for the CERN Proton Synchrotron Multi-Turn Extraction

Crossing a horizontal nonlinear resonance is the approach that can be used to split a beam in several beamlets with the goal to perform multi-turn extraction from a circular particle accelerator. Such an approach has been successfully implemented in the CERN Proton Synchrotron and is used routinely for the production of high-intensity proton beams for fixed-target physics at the Super Proton Synchrotron. Recently, thanks to the deployment of diamond detectors, originally installed to monitor the beam losses at extraction, it has been possible to measure the horizontal beam emittance of the split beam just prior to extraction. This is the first time that an emittance measurement is attempted for split beams, i.e. in a regime of highly nonlinear beam dynamics. In this paper, the technique is presented and its application to the analysis of the experimental data is presented and discussed in detail. This result is essential for the performance assessment of the splitting process and for the design of further performance improvements