Nexus of thermal resilience and energy efficiency in buildings: A case study of a nursing home

Extreme weather events become more frequent and severe due to climate change. Although energy efficiency technologies can influence thermal resilience of buildings, they are traditionally studied separately, and their interconnections are rarely quantified. This study developed a methodology of modeling and analysis to provide insights into the nexus of thermal resilience and energy efficiency of buildings. We conducted a case study of a real nursing home in Florida, where 12 patients died during Hurricane Irma in 2017 due to HVAC system power loss, to understand and quantify how passive and active energy efficiency measures (EEMs) can improve thermal resilience to reduce heat-exposure risk of patients. Results show that passive measures of opening windows and doors for natural ventilation, as well as miscellaneous load reduction, are very effective in eliminating the extreme dangerous occasions. However, to maintain safe conditions, active measures such as on-site power generators and thermal storage are also needed. The nursing home was further studied by changing its location to two other cities: San Francisco (mild climate) and Chicago (cold winter and hot summer). Results revealed that the EEMs' impacts on thermal resilience vary significantly by climate and building characteristics. The study also estimated the costs of EEMs to help stakeholders prioritize the measures. Passive measures that may not save energy may greatly improve thermal resilience, and thus should be considered in building design or retrofit. Findings from this study indicate energy efficiency technologies should be evaluated not only by their energy savings performance but also by their influence on a building's resilience to extreme weather events

BRST invariance and de Rham-type cohomology of 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole

We exploit the 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole to define closed algebra of the quantum field operators and the BRST charge $Q_{BRST}$. In the first-class configuration of the Dirac quantization, by including the $Q_{BRST}$-exact gauge fixing term and the Faddeev-Popov ghost term, we find the BRST invariant Hamiltonian to investigate the de Rham-type cohomology group structure for the monopole system. The Bogomol'nyi bound is also discussed in terms of the first-class topological charge defined on the extended internal 2-sphere.Comment: 8 page

System-level key performance indicators for building performance evaluation

Quantifying building energy performance through the development and use of key performance indicators (KPIs) is an essential step in achieving energy saving goals in both new and existing buildings. Current methods used to evaluate improvements, however, are not well represented at the system-level (e.g., lighting, plug-loads, HVAC, service water heating). Instead, they are typically only either measured at the whole building level (e.g., energy use intensity) or at the equipment level (e.g., chiller efficiency coefficient of performance (COP)) with limited insights for benchmarking and diagnosing deviations in performance of aggregated equipment that delivers a specific service to a building (e.g., space heating, lighting). The increasing installation of sensors and meters in buildings makes the evaluation of building performance at the system level more feasible through improved data collection. Leveraging this opportunity, this study introduces a set of system-level KPIs, which cover four major end-use systems in buildings: lighting, MELs (Miscellaneous Electric Loads, aka plug loads), HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning), and SWH (service water heating), and their eleven subsystems. The system KPIs are formulated in a new context to represent various types of performance, including energy use, peak demand, load shape, occupant thermal comfort and visual comfort, ventilation, and water use. This paper also presents a database of system KPIs using the EnergyPlus simulation results of 16 USDOE prototype commercial building models across four vintages and five climate zones. These system KPIs, although originally developed for office buildings, can be applied to other building types with some adjustment or extension. Potential applications of system KPIs for system performance benchmarking and diagnostics, code compliance, and measurement and verification are discussed

Mass Terms in Effective Theories of High Density Quark Matter

We study the structure of mass terms in the effective theory for quasi-particles in QCD at high baryon density. To next-to-leading order in the $1/p_F$ expansion we find two types of mass terms, chirality conserving two-fermion operators and chirality violating four-fermion operators. In the effective chiral theory for Goldstone modes in the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase the former terms correspond to effective chemical potentials, while the latter lead to Lorentz invariant mass terms. We compute the masses of Goldstone bosons in the CFL phase, confirming earlier results by Son and Stephanov as well as Bedaque and Sch\"afer. We show that to leading order in the coupling constant $g$ there is no anti-particle gap contribution to the mass of Goldstone modes, and that our results are independent of the choice of gauge.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Flavor symmetry breaking effects on SU(3) Skyrmion

We study the massive SU(3) Skyrmion model to investigate the flavor symmetry breaking (FSB) effects on the static properties of the strange baryons in the framework of the rigid rotator quantization scheme combined with the improved Dirac quantization one. Both the chiral symmetry breaking pion mass and FSB kinetic terms are shown to improve $c$ the ratio of the strange-light to light-light interaction strengths and $\bar{c}$ that of the strange-strange to light-light.Comment: 12 pages, latex, no figure

Presumed choroidal metastasis from soft tissue myoepithelial carcinoma

Purpose: To report a case of presumed choroidal metastasis from soft tissue myoepithelial carcinoma and highlight challenges in its diagnosis. Observations: A 52-year-old man was referred with a two-week history of photopsia in his left eye. His background medical history included known soft tissue myoepithelial carcinoma metastatic to his bone, lung, liver and chest wall. A large, raised, yellow choroidal lesion was identified nasal to and abutting the optic disc. This lesion demonstrated growth 1 month after presentation. The patient died with widespread metastatic disease 5 months after initial presentation. Conclusion and importance: Soft tissue myoepithelial carcinoma can rarely metastasise to the choroid and present as a rapidly-growing, yellow, echodense tumour with serous retinal detachment. MRI brain can assist in tumour evaluation and monitoring progression, while immunoperoxidase stains and molecular testing can assist with diagnosis. The condition has an aggressive natural history and poor prognosi

Coupling of Josephson current qubits using a connecting loop

We propose a coupling scheme for the three-Josephson junction qubits which uses a connecting loop, but not mutual inductance. Present scheme offers the advantages of a large and tunable level splitting in implementing the controlled-NOT (CNOT) operation. We calculate the switching probabilities of the coupled qubits in the CNOT operations and demonstrate that present CNOT gate can meet the criteria for the fault-tolerant quantum computing. We obtain the coupling strength as a function of the coupling energy of the Josephson junction and the length of the connecting loop which varies with selecting two qubits from the scalable design.Comment: 5 pages with updates, version to appear in Phys. Rev.