How plants inspire façades. From plants to architecture: Biomimetic principles for the development of adaptive architectural envelopes

Façades have an important role in the control of energy waste in buildings, nevertheless most of them are designed to provide static design solutions, wasting large amounts of energy to maintain the internal comfort. However, biological adaptation solutions are complex, multi-functional and highly responsive. This paper proposes a biomimetic research of the relationship that can be developed between Biology and Architecture in order to propose innovative façade design solutions. We focus on plants, because of plants, like buildings, lack of movement and remain subject to a specific location. Nevertheless, plants have adapted to the environment developing special means of interaction with changing external issues. This paper provides a methodology to create a data collection of plant adaptations and a design mapping to guide the transfer from biological principles to architectural resources, as well as two design concept cases, opening new perspectives for new possible technical solutions and showing the potential of plant adaptations to environmental conditions at a specific climate. Further step is the transformation of some design concepts into technical solutions through experiments with new technologies that include multi-material 3D printing or advances in material science

The role of translational invariance in non linear gauge theories of gravity

The internal structure of the tetrads in a Poincar\'e non linear gauge theory of gravity is considered. Minkowskian coordinates becomes dynamical degrees of freedom playing the role of Goldstone bosons of the translations. A critical length allowing a covariant expansion similar to the weak field approach is deduced, the zeroth order metric being maximally symmetric (Minkowskian in some cases).Comment: 17 pages, LaTe

Migration Patterns in Male Great Bustards (Otis tarda)

5 paginas, 1 figura y 1 tableThe Great Bustard (Otis tarda) is distributed from Iberia and Morocco in the west to China in the east and has been considered sedentary in all but the northern and eastern parts of its range (Gewalt 1959, Glutz et al. 1973, Cramp and Simmons 1980). However, some studies have reported seasonal changes in population numbers in different areas in the Iberian Peninsula (Hidalgo and Carranza 1990, Alonso et al. 1995), suggesting that the species is a partial migrant (sensu Terrill and Able 1988) in this region. We describe seasonal movements of marked adult male Great Bustards and discuss observed patterns in relation to the following questions: (1) Do migratory males display interannual fidelity to breeding and postbreeding areas? (2) Do males travel significantly farther than females in their seasonal movements? We also suggest several hypotheses that could explain patterns of partial and differential migration in male Great Bustards.This study is a contribution to DGICYT-project PB94–0068.Peer reviewe

Evaluation of captive breeding as a method to conserve threatened Great Bustard populations.

6 paginas y 1 tableThe recent Great Bustard Action Plan summarizes de main recommended lines of action to preserve current populations and their habitats in Europe. Among others, captive breeding is mentioned as a method to save clutches found in the field whose hatching success probability is suspected to be low for any reason. Birds hatched from these clutches have been used to either build up small captive-breeding flocks that ensure preservation of the genetic pool of seriously threatened populations once these may be extinct, or to be released into the natural populations as juveniles. In this paper we evaluate the viability of captive breeding in the light of new results of a recent study of juvenile Great Bustards during their maternal dependence period, family break-up and dispersal. The few data available on survival of captive-bred young after being released suggest that they suffer a high mortality, probably due to the lack of the experience acquired in natural conditions from their mothers. The negative effects of imprinting by their human keepers, particularly in relation with display and mating, has not been sufficiently investigated. These and other aspects make captive breeding questionable as an effective method, as compared with habitat protection measures.PB94-0068 of the Dirección General de Investigacion Cientifica y TecnicaPeer reviewe

Migration Patterns in Male Great Bustards (Otis tarda)

5 paginas, 1 figura y 1 tableThe Great Bustard (Otis tarda) is distributed from Iberia and Morocco in the west to China in the east and has been considered sedentary in all but the northern and eastern parts of its range (Gewalt 1959, Glutz et al. 1973, Cramp and Simmons 1980). However, some studies have reported seasonal changes in population numbers in different areas in the Iberian Peninsula (Hidalgo and Carranza 1990, Alonso et al. 1995), suggesting that the species is a partial migrant (sensu Terrill and Able 1988) in this region. We describe seasonal movements of marked adult male Great Bustards and discuss observed patterns in relation to the following questions: (1) Do migratory males display interannual fidelity to breeding and postbreeding areas? (2) Do males travel significantly farther than females in their seasonal movements? We also suggest several hypotheses that could explain patterns of partial and differential migration in male Great Bustards.This study is a contribution to DGICYT-project PB94–0068.Peer reviewe

On the use of NASGRO software to estimate fatigue crack growth under variable amplitude loading in aluminium alloy 2024-T351

This work uses the strip yield model implemented in NASGRO software to estimate fatigue life under random loading. Simulated results were compared with experimental data previously obtained by the authors using different random loading processes in Al2024-T351. Test data under constant amplitude loading from different authors have been considered in order to characterize the material behaviour and fit the model parameters. The two different strip yield model implemented in NASGRO software were considered. The ratio of simulated to experimental fatigue lives was between 0.71 and 1.52 considering all options and between 0.87 and 1.12 with the best option.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2012-33382Junta de Andalucía TEP-324

Optimal Power Dispatch in a Microgrid

This paper is concerned with the power dispatch in a microgrid. The dispatch problem is formulated as linear program. Thus, the proposed solution is the application of neural network that solves linear programming on-line. This proposal in motivated by the increasing electric energy demand and the rising need to incorporate sustainable energy sources to the power grid in a reliable scheme. A microgrid is an interconnection of distributed energy sources (DES), with the tendency to include renewable energies that offer many advantages to customers and utilities. The different DES that compose the microgrid are controlled independently to track the optimal reference provided by the proposed method in order to supply a demanded power output minimizing the consumed power from the main grid.ITESO, A.C.CINVESTAV-IP

Adaptation strategies to climate change in the tourist sector: The case of coastal tourism in Spain

Tourism activities, that are very important in the Spanish Mediterranean coast since 60s, have been described as highly vulnerable to climate change. Diversification of the tourism and tourist products are often presented as a possible strategy for adapting to the effects of climate change. The present study explores the initiatives in product diversification that are being put into practice in the Spanish Mediterranean coastal tourism sector. To this end, the study focuses on the analysis of the experiences of the rural tourism sector as an alternative to sun-and-sand tourism in the Alt Empordà (Costa Brava, North-eastern Spain). Methodology of this research is based in two aspects: a) desk research of relevant public documents aimed to promote the diversification of the tourist sector; b) regional survey of rural tourism establishments. The analysis reveals a process of diversification that is characterised by spontaneous developments that lack planning and shows an absence of product structuring in accordance with a segmentation of the market. Given these characteristics, the process of diversification that has taken place will not contribute to increasing adaptation\u27s capacity of tourism to climate change or, consequently, to reducing its level of vulnerability

Automatic mapping of parallel applications on multicore architectures using the Servet benchmark suite

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Computers & Electrical Engineering. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2011.12.007[Abstract] Servet is a suite of benchmarks focused on detecting a set of parameters with high influence on the overall performance of multicore systems. These parameters can be used for autotuning codes to increase their performance on multicore clusters. Although Servet has been proved to detect accurately cache hierarchies, bandwidths and bottlenecks in memory accesses, as well as the communication overhead among cores, up to now the impact of the use of this information on application performance optimization has not been assessed. This paper presents a novel algorithm that automatically uses Servet for mapping parallel applications on multicore systems and analyzes its impact on three testbeds using three different parallel programming models: message-passing, shared memory and partitioned global address space (PGAS). Our results show that a suitable mapping policy based on the data provided by this tool can significantly improve the performance of parallel applications without source code modification.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735Ministerio de Educación; FPU; AP2008-01578Xunta de Galicia; INCITE08PXIB105161P