2004 DCRP Best Master’s Project: Historic Rehabilitation: An Important Economic Development Tool for North Carolina

Tax incentives for historic rehabilitation can promote central-city economic development around legacy sites that otherwise would go neglected under inexorable and institutionalized suburbanization. North Carolina has had some success with its historic rehabilitation tax credit, but it could learn from other states’ experiences in improving this program

A proposed approach for developing next-generation computational electromagnetics software

Computations have become a tool coequal with mathematics and measurements as a means of performing electromagnetic analysis and design. This is demonstrated by the volume of articles and meeting presentations in which computational electromagnetics (CEM) is routinely employed to address an increasing variety of problems. Yet, in spite of the substantial resources invested in CEM software over the past three decades, little real progress seems to have been made towards providing the EM engineer software tools having a functionality equivalent to that expected of hardware instrumentation. Furthermore, the bulk of CEM software now available is generally of limited applicability to large, complex problems because most modeling codes employ a single field propagator, or analytical form, of Maxwell`s Equations. The acknowledged advantages of hybrid models, i.e., those which employ different propagators in differing regions of a problem, are relatively unexploited. The thrust of this discussion is to propose a new approach designed to address both problems outlined above, integrating advances being made in both software and hardware development. After briefly reviewing the evolution of modeling CEM software to date and pointing out the deficiencies thereof, we describe an approach for making CEM tools more truly ``user friendly`` called EMSES (Electromagnetic Modeling and Simulation Environment for Systems). This will be achieved through two main avenues. One is developing a common problem-description language implemented in a visual programming environment working together with a translator that produces the specific model description needed by various numerical treatments, in order to optimize user efficiency. The other is to employ a new modeling paradigm based on the idea of field propagators to expedite the development of the hybrid models that are needed to optimize computation efficiency