Aesthetic perception of photovoltaic integration within new proposals for ecological architecture

Architecture has become an important field of research on the mitigation of climate change. The 4literature contains a number of environmental studies of buildings conducted using the Life Cycle 5Analysis method, while others have analysed improvements in the energy efficiency. Important advances have also been made by integrating renewable energies within the building envelope. In architecture, however, it must be remembered that the formal aspect is as important as the functional one, and therefore rating the aesthetic perception of these new technologies is very interesting for future innovation projects and their integration within society. This work focuses on the aesthetic impact resulting from the use of photovoltaic systems that can be integrated within the building envelope or installed upon its surface. A survey was conducted using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) to evaluate the feelings that such systems arouse, through two classic dimensions of affect: hedonic valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and arousal (activation or emotional intensity). Overall, results (error range of 5%) show that all the prototypes were rated positively and with a medium level of arousal, but those that use integrated systems obtained higher values in both dimensions of affect. Respondents’ age was observed as an influential factor in these subjective evaluations

Comparison of temporary or continuous immersion systems for micropropagation in liquid medium of axillary shoots of Salix viminalis.

In this study the response to culture in liquid medium of axillary shoots of two woody species, chestnut and willow, has been compared. Both species differ in their recalcitrance to micropropagation, especially in their rooting and acclimatization abilities. Parameters such as explant type, supporting material, bioreactor type, number of immersions and/or aerations were tested. Continuous and temporary immersion systems have been applied to both species and several differences were detected. Hyperhydricity was not observed in willow shoots cultured in liquid medium with aeration, but this disorder affected chestnut cultures unless supporting materials as rockwool cubes were used. Besides, willow shoots rooted spontaneously in liquid culture, whereas chestnut shoots required an auxin treatment. In spite of these differences, both species showed better performance in liquid culture than in semi-solid medium, and shoots from an adult willow genotype and from eight selected chestnut genotypes (hybrids of European and Asian chestnuts) were successfully rooted and acclimatized.Peer reviewe

Aesthetic impact of solar energy systems

The presence of solar energy systems has increased significantly in recent years both in rural areas –in the form of solar farms–, and in urban areas as part of building installations. This transformation of the landscape, in spite of the good social acceptance of solar energy, causes an aesthetic impact whose interest has been growing in literature in recent years. This study aimed to review prior literature in order to establish the objective factors, aesthetic perception and methods that are most relevant when assessing the aesthetic impact. As a result of the lack of consensus, a new qualitative theoretical framework is proposed that can serve as a basis for future research in the field of the integration of solar energy and its aesthetic impact. The framework comprises three sub-impacts: land use, solar system energy and glare. The results are discussed for future research and innovation in building photovoltaic integration and for SES site location and its environmental impact assessments

EU-Funded Projects with Actual Implementation of Renewable Energies in Cities. Analysis of Their Concern for Aesthetic Impact

Social acceptance and aesthetic impact of renewable energy (RE) in cities are topics scarcely considered in the literature even though they have attracted growing interest. Innovative Europeanfunded projects, therefore, should start to consider these concepts. This paper provides an innovative review of European projects with the aim of identifying those with actual implementation of RE and energy storage systems in urban environments and their concern for aesthetic impact. The search considered the five most relevant programs related to RE and climate change mitigation, including almost 14,000 projects. Furthermore, a survey and some interviews allowed to collect data about the selected projects. 0.1% of reviewed projects aimed at the actual installation of RE on an urban scale. However, there is a recent growing trend. The most used RE was solar, especially photovoltaic, while the most common system for energy storage was lithium batteries. We can affirm that these European projects do not currently show any particular concern for the aesthetic impact they cause in cities, nor for the social perception assessment. It would be advisable to consider technologies as products and basic components of work and daily life, and not only as a means of intervention to promote RE

Characterisation of clays from Alicante province (SE Spain) for use in the recovery of degraded soils

The goal of this paper is the characterisation of seven clays of the province of Alicante (SE Spain) and their possible use to improve the fertility, water absorption and contaminant-retaining capacity of degraded soils. Three soils affected by the dumping of construction debris were also studied to diagnose the problems and possible recovery strategies. Several physicochemical properties were measured, such as the water holding capacity, soil organic matter, lime, pH, EC and CEC. A high correlationship between mineralogical and elemental composition was obtained. Illite was present in all clays and soils. Some of the samples also contained kaolinite and significant amounts of lime. The CEC, as expected, was more closely related to the organic matter content. Soil organic matter was detected in the second derivative of the FTIR spectra by the signals of the CH2 groups at 2850 and 2919. This way, the FTIR spectrum for the soils of the area would make it possible to estimate both the organic matter content and the CEC. Despite their origin, soils did not show heavy metal pollution; however, salinisation risk seemed to be the most probable cause of degradation. According to the organic matter, lime and illite content, two clays were selected as the most suitable for soil degradation recovery. Furthermore, organic matter additions may help to improve the self-depurative ability of the soil

Mapping the sustainable development goals into the EDINSOST sustainability map of bachelor engineering degrees

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This Research to Practice Work in Progress paper presents the work conducted on the use of the Sustainability Map of Bachelor Engineering Degrees (a tool developed by the EDINSOST project) to analyze how Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are developed in each Degree. Over recent years, there has been a growth in the importance of working sustainability based on the SDGs. To identify which learning objective of each SDG corresponds to each learning outcome of the EDINSOST Sustainability Map, a correspondence matrix has been defined. The matrix contains the learning outcomes of the EDINSOST Sustainability Map in its rows, and the 17 SDGs in the columns. The cells of the matrix contain the learning objectives of the SDGs that correspond to each learning outcome of the EDINSOST Sustainability Map. This work in progress presents the first results of the process of mapping the SDGs into the EDINSOST Sustainability Map of Engineering Bachelor Degrees. Early results show that some of the 169 learning objectives are not applicable to Engineering Degrees. Likewise, we have seen that learning objectives have been defined more for policy makers than for engineers, and therefore adaptation is not an easy task. However, the work done has helped us to verify that the EDINSOST Sustainability Map can help in the introduction of the SDGs into the curriculum.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A learning tool to develop sustainable projects

This paper presents a tool developed to help engineers to design and develop sustainable projects. The tool has been designed to introduce and evaluate the sustainability of engineering projects in general, but here we show its application to assess the final project of an engineering degree. This tool is a guide for students to introduce and estimate the sustainability of their projects, but it also helps teachers to assess them. The tool is based on the Socratic Methodology and consists of a matrix where each cell contains several questions that students must consider during the project development and which they must answer in their project report. A positive or negative mark is assigned to every cell, and the sum of all marks states the project sustainability. However, the result is not as simplistic as a final number, but a descriptive sustainability analysis where questions are answered and every mark justified. A pilot test with some students has obtained good results, but the first Final Degree Project using this methodology will be read in July 2016.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Parallel SUMIS Soft Detector for Large MIMO Systems on Multicore and GPU

[EN] The number of transmit and receiver antennas is an important factor that affects the performance and complexity of a MIMO system. A MIMO system with very large number of antennas is a promising candidate technology for next generations of wireless systems. However, the vast majority of the methods proposed for conventional MIMO system are not suitable for large dimensions. In this context, the use of high-performance computing systems, such us multicore CPUs and graphics processing units has become attractive for efficient implementation of parallel signal processing algorithms with high computational requirements. In the present work, two practical parallel approaches of the Subspace Marginalization with Interference Suppression detector for large MIMO systems have been proposed. Both approaches have been evaluated and compared in terms of performance and complexity with other detectors for different system parameters.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish MINECO Grant RACHEL TEC2013-47141-C4-4-R, the PROMETEO FASE II 2014/003 Project and FPU AP-2012/71274Ramiro Sánchez, C.; Simarro, MA.; Gonzalez, A.; Vidal Maciá, AM. (2019). Parallel SUMIS Soft Detector for Large MIMO Systems on Multicore and GPU. The Journal of Supercomputing. 75(3):1256-1267. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2403-9S12561267753Rusek F, Persson D, Lau BK, Larsson EG, Marzetta TL, Edfors O, Tufvesson F (2013) Scaling up MIMO: opportunities and challenges with very large arrays. IEEE Signal Proc Mag 30(1):40–60Studer C, Burg A, Bölcskei H (2008) Soft-output sphere decoding: algorithms and VLSI implementation. IEEE J Sel Areas Commun 26(2):290–300Wang R, Giannakis GB (2004) Approaching MIMO channel capacity with reduced-complexity soft sphere decoding. In: Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, 2004. WCNC. 2004 IEEE vol 3, pp 1620–1625Persson D, Larsson EG (2011) Partial marginalization soft MIMO detection with higher order constellations. IEEE Trans Signal Procces 59(1):453–458Cîrkić M, Larsson EG (2014) SUMIS: near-optimal soft-in soft-out MIMO detection with low and fixed complexity. IEEE Trans Signal Process 62(12):3084–3097Alberto Gonzalez C, Ramiro, M, Ángeles Simarro, Antonio M Vidal (2017) Parallel SUMIS soft detector for MIMO systems on multicore. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Methods in Science and Engineering, pp 1729–1736Hochwald BM, ten Brink S (2003) Achieving near-capacity on a multiple-antenna channel. IEEE Trans Commun 51:389–399Kaipeng L, Bei Y, Michael W, Joseph RC, Christoph S (2015) Accelerating massive MIMO uplink detection on GPU for SDR systems. In: 2015 IEEE dallas circuits and systems conference (DCAS), pp 1–4Di W, Eilert J, Liu D (2011) Implementation of a high-speed MIMO soft-output symbol detector for software defined radio. J Signal Process Syst 63(1):27–37Anderson E, Bai Z, Bischof C, Blackford LS, Demmel J, Dongarra J, Du Croz J, Greenbaum A, Hammarling S, McKenney A, Sorensen D (1999) LAPACK users’ guide. SIAM, LondonIntel MKL Reference Manual (2015) https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/mkl-reference-manualcuBLAS Documentation (2015) http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cublasDagum L, Enon R (1998) OpenMP: an industry standard API for shared-memory programming. IEEE Comput Sci Eng 5(1):46–55CUDA Toolkit Documentation, Version 7.5 (2015) https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkitRoger S, Ramiro C, Gonzalez A, Almenar V, Vidal AM (2012) Fully parallel GPU implementation of a fixed-complexity soft-output MIMO detector. IEEE Trans Veh Technol 61(8):3796–3800Senst M, Ascheid G, Lüders H (2010) Performance evaluation of the markov chain monte carlo MIMO detector based on mutual information. 2010 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), pp 1–

Parallel Two-Stage Least Squares algorithms for Simultaneous Equations Models on GPU

Today it is usual to have computational systems formed by a multicore together with one or more GPUs. These systems are heterogeneous, due to the di erent types of memory in the GPUs and to the di erent speeds of computation of the cores in the CPU and the GPU. To accelerate the solution of complex problems it is necessary to combine the two basic components (CPU and GPU) in the heterogeneous system. This paper analyzes the use of a multicore+multiGPU system for solving Simultaneous Equations Models by the Two-Stage Least Squares method with QR decomposition. The combination of CPU and GPU allows us to reduce the execution time in the solution of large SEM.Ramiro Sánchez, C.; López-Espín, JJ.; Giménez, D.; Vidal, AM. (2012). Parallel Two-Stage Least Squares algorithms for Simultaneous Equations Models on GPU. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1496

A methodology to introduce sustainability into the Final Year Project to foster sustainable engineering projects

The introduction of sustainability skills into higher education curricula is a natural effect of the increasing importance of sustainability in our daily lives. Topics like green computing, sustainable design or environmental engineering have become part of the knowledge required by today’s engineers. Furthermore, we strongly believe that the introduction of this skill will eventually enable future engineers to develop sustainable products, services and projects. The Final Year Project is the last academic stage facing students and a step towards their future professional engineering projects. As such, it constitutes a rehearsal for their professional future and an ideal opportunity for reflecting on whether their Final Year Project is sustainable or not, and to what extent. It also provides a good tool for reviewing the lessons learned about sustainability during the degree course and for applying them in a holistic and integrated way. In this paper, we present a guide that allows both students and advisors to think carefully about the sustainability of engineering projects, in particular the Final Year Project.Postprint (author’s final draft