Architecture of care in the urban public space: A philosophical inquiry in ‘Ethics of care’ to inform the nature of the urban public space

Within any urban setting, the public space has always reflected the city’s social, economic, cultural, and environmental well-being. In the broader discussion of urban environmental sustainability, however, there has been a pronounced dualism and an implicit hierarchy of value when looking at the city-ecology paradigm. This corresponds to the political-social, human- nature and especially subject-object divides within the perspectives on the sustainability of urban public spaces. I associate this divide and the subsequent domination of pedagogies that lack feminist approaches in analyzing qualitative aspects like experience, well-being, and equity. Do public spaces belong to women and nature? Do women belong to public spaces? If they really do, can it change the nature of the public space? This dissertation thus adopts a critical eco-feminist perspective, to expand its concepts in relation to urban public spaces to build a holistic definition of urban environmental sustainability. I seek a philosophical inquiry into the ethics of care to shape my argument on the spatial nature of the public space. The methodology adopted uses contemporary feminist philosophy and environmental ethics to critically investigate various aspects that determine the relationship of women and the urban public space. In this philosophical dissertation, firstly, I investigate the public spaces through the spatiotemporal and gendered lens by considering scholarly literature on the nature of the urban public space. Secondly, I draw theoretical threads from most importantly, Luce Irigaray’s perspectives on an ethic of sexuate difference and feminine subjectivity to investigate the feminine aspects of the use of public space. Finally, I develop the concept of the ethic of care, differently, for better addressing the issue of gender equity, environmental sustainability to impact women’s political, emotional and relational well-being within the public space. In conclusion, this dissertation advocates ‘care’ as a central value, to shape the spatial nature of the urban public space and an approach to achieve socio-ecological sustainability and well-being in urban public spaces

Autocomplete recommendation plugin and Summarizing Text using Natural Language Processing

Expert-caliber documents, reports, letters, and resumes can be easily developed using Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office offers capabilities such as grammar check, text and font checking & formatting, HTML compatibility, advanced page layout, image support, and more in contrast to a plain text editor, however, it does not have the autocomplete abbreviations feature. The paper proposes an Autocomplete abbreviation Recommendation System that will integrate the benefits of getting automatic suggestions of either full forms, abbreviations, or both by clicking on the option that is being suggested. This will provide more flexibility to the user using existing Microsoft Office platforms. To create this feature, we have examined the JavaScript JQuery functions to implement a basic autocomplete feature. Information overloading is also one of the most important problems brought on by the Internet's explosive expansion. Massive quantities of text are difficult for people to manually summarise. Thus, there is now a greater need for summarizers that are more sophisticated and potent. Hence, Python's packages, methods, and NLP are used in this work to implement Text Summarization. By using this technique, the phrase's overall meaning is enhanced and the reader's comprehension is enhanced

Solid Phase Sorption of Phenols on Metals Acetylacetonates

The solid phase extraction properties of surface layers of Eu(III), Al(III), Fe(III), Cr(III) acetylacetonates are compared for sorption some phenols and chlorophenols. The effects of the energies of adsorption and complexation on the retention of various sorbates were calculated. GC methods with preconcentration are proposed to evaluate phenols by means of solid-phase extraction on a sorbent with a surface layer of Eu acetylacetonate with extraction effectiveness of 85%

A hygrothermal modelling approach to water vapour sorption isotherm design for mesoporous humidity buffers

This paper describes the development of a design technique using hygrothermal numerical modelling for top-down predictive design and optimisation of water vapour sorption isotherms to match any humidity buffering application. This was used to inform the design and synthesis of two new mesoporous silica (MS) materials suitable for specific applications. To validate the technique, the new materials were experimentally assessed using gravimetric dynamic vapour sorption (DVS). The experimental isotherms closely matched the optimised isotherm predictions from the design stage, and a positive correlation was observed between the rate of change in adsorbed water content, Δw and the time taken to exceed the permissible upper limit of humidity, φi,U in a closed environment. A positive non-linear correlation was determined between the interior volumetric moisture load, ωml and the mass of adsorbent required to fully achieve humidity buffering between specified lower/ upper limits (φi,L and φi,U). The kinetics of water vapour sorption/ desorption were found to have general agreement when using the current hygrothermal numerical model. Current hygrothermal models appear to significantly underestimate the rate of adsorption/ desorption in rapid-response mesoporous silica type materials. This is perhaps largely due to the current lack of consideration for scanning curve prediction within hysteresis loops and so is a priority for future research

High-pressure pyrolysis and gasification of biomass

With the limited reserves of fossil fuels and the environmental problems associated with their use, the world is moving towards cleaner, renewable, and sustainable sources of energy. Biomass is a promising feedstock towards attaining this goal because it is abundant, renewable, and can be considered as a carbon neutral source of energy. Syngas can be further processed to produce liquid fuels, hydrogen, high value chemicals, or it can be converted to heat and power using turbines. Most of the downstream processing of syngas occurs at high pressures, which requires cost intensive gas compression. It has been considered to be techno-economically advantageous to generate pressurized syngas by performing high-pressure gasification. Gasification utilizes high temperatures and an oxidizing gas to convert biomass to synthesis gas (syngas, a mixture of CO and H2). Most of the past studies on gasification used process conditions that did not simulate an industrial gasification operation. This work aims at understanding the chemical and physical transformations taking place during high-pressure biomass gasification at heating rates of practical significance. We have adopted an approach of breaking down the gasification process into two steps: 1) Pyrolysis or devolatalization (fast step), and 2) Char gasification (slow step). This approach allows us to understand pyrolysis and char gasification separately and also to study the effect of pyrolysis conditions on the char gasification kinetics. Alkali and alkaline earth metals in biomass are known to catalyze the gasification reaction. This potentially makes biomass feedstock a cheap source of catalyst during coal gasification. This work also explores catalytic interactions in biomass-coal blends during co-gasification of the mixed feeds. The results of this study can be divided into four parts: (a) pyrolysis of loblolly pine; (b) gasification of pine chars; (c) pyrolysis and gasification of switchgrass; (d) co-gasification of pine/switchgrass with lignite and bituminous coals.Ph.D