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

Coordinated Multicasting with Opportunistic User Selection in Multicell Wireless Systems

Physical layer multicasting with opportunistic user selection (OUS) is examined for multicell multi-antenna wireless systems. By adopting a two-layer encoding scheme, a rate-adaptive channel code is applied in each fading block to enable successful decoding by a chosen subset of users (which varies over different blocks) and an application layer erasure code is employed across multiple blocks to ensure that every user is able to recover the message after decoding successfully in a sufficient number of blocks. The transmit signal and code-rate in each block determine opportunistically the subset of users that are able to successfully decode and can be chosen to maximize the long-term multicast efficiency. The employment of OUS not only helps avoid rate-limitations caused by the user with the worst channel, but also helps coordinate interference among different cells and multicast groups. In this work, efficient algorithms are proposed for the design of the transmit covariance matrices, the physical layer code-rates, and the target user subsets in each block. In the single group scenario, the system parameters are determined by maximizing the group-rate, defined as the physical layer code-rate times the fraction of users that can successfully decode in each block. In the multi-group scenario, the system parameters are determined by considering a group-rate balancing optimization problem, which is solved by a successive convex approximation (SCA) approach. To further reduce the feedback overhead, we also consider the case where only part of the users feed back their channel vectors in each block and propose a design based on the balancing of the expected group-rates. In addition to SCA, a sample average approximation technique is also introduced to handle the probabilistic terms arising in this problem. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is demonstrated by computer simulations.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Gromov-Witten invariants of blow-ups along submanifolds with convex normal bundles

Given a submanifold Z inside X, let Y be the blow-up of X along Z. When the normal bundle of Z in X is convex with a minor assumption, we prove that genus-zero GW-invariants of Y with cohomology insertions from X, are identical to GW-invariants of X. Under the same hypothesis, a vanishing theorem is also proved. An example to which these two theorems apply is when the normal bundle is generated by global sections. These two main theorems do not hold for arbitrary blow-ups, and counter-examples are included.Comment: 34 page

Acid Sphingomyelinase Regulates the Localization and Trafficking of Palmitoylated Proteins

In human, loss of Acid Sphingomeylinase (ASM/SMPD1) causes Niemann-Pick Disease, type A. ASM hydrolyzes sphingomyelins to produce ceramides but protein targets of ASM remain largely unclear. ... See full text for complete abstract

Effects of isospin and momentum dependent interactions on liquid-gas phase transition in hot asymmetric nuclear matter

The liquid-gas phase transition in hot neutron-rich nuclear matter is investigated within a self-consistent thermal model using an isospin and momentum dependent interaction (MDI) constrained by the isospin diffusion data in heavy-ion collisions, a momentum-independent interaction (MID), and an isoscalar momentum-dependent interaction (eMDYI). The boundary of the phase-coexistence region is shown to be sensitive to the density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy with a softer symmetry energy giving a higher critical pressure and a larger area of phase-coexistence region. Compared with the momentum-independent MID interaction, the isospin and momentum-dependent MDI interaction is found to increase the critical pressure and enlarge the area of phase-coexistence region. For the isoscalar momentum-dependent eMDYI interaction, a limiting pressure above which the liquid-gas phase transition cannot take place has been found and it is shown to be sensitive to the stiffness of the symmetry energy.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, revised version, to appear in PL