Coffee-Stability of Agglomerated Whole Milk Powder and other Dairy Creamer Emulsions

End of Project ReportThe objectives of this project were: (a) to investigate the circumstances that cause milk powders and creamers to fail when added to coffee based beverages; (b) to evaluate the role of processing variables in relation to their thermostabilising effects on milk during drying of coffee whiteners; and (c) to determine the role of emulsion formation on the stability of imitation creamers.Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marin

Up on the roof: a review of design, construction, and technology trends in vertical extensions

New spaces to accommodate growing urban populations should be created in a way that also reduces building lifecycle carbon emissions. In this context, the vertical extension (VE) has emerged as a novel building typology that can increase space in cities through the construction of additional floor area atop existing base buildings. This paper presents a review of 172 VE projects worldwide to provide an understanding of their design and construction trends, and to classify the technologies applied. Results show that VE construction has accelerated significantly over the past decade. Although most VEs consist of only small vertical additions, often one to two storeys, higher VEs can be built with innovative structural strategies and lightweight materials. Industrial buildings are often found to provide significant opportunities for VE due to their higher structural capacity. By comparing the characteristics and design of VEs, typologies based on architectural, structural, and construction technologies are presented

Vertical Extensions: Stakeholder Perspectives on Development Decisions and Construction Strategies

A vertical extension (VE) involves the construction of additional floor space on top of an existing base building. With growing urban populations and an urgency to reduce building-related carbon emissions, VEs might have the potential to be a sustainable and innovative solution to overcome the shortage of urban spaces. However, despite the growing number of projects and the emerging academic literature, limited research has documented the decisions that inform the development of VE projects or the lessons learned from stakeholders that were involved in their creation. This paper presents the early decision-making processes that are undertaken to select a VE as an appropriate development type to construct in practice, and the common challenges and solutions during its realization, through semistructured interviews with a broad range of stakeholders, including developers, contractors, architects, and structural engineers that have been involved in recently completed VE projects. The results identify that the main driver of VEs is economic profit, followed by sustainability goals and the desire to stay on the same site. The challenges are related to the complex design and coordination of VE projects, and onsite construction challenges. In addition, this paper identifies the diverse structural support and reinforcement strategies that are used in VEs and contributes to the knowledge by capturing the different aesthetic and construction approaches that are used in practice

Tall buildings and sustainability

The first decade of the 21st Century can easily be labelled the most active in the 125 year history of the tall building typology, with more, and taller, skyscrapers being constructed than at any other time. This boom in construction has coincided with a global recognition for the need to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gases with climate change becoming arguably the greatest challenge of the modern world. In light of this, attention has turned towards the environmental impact of tall buildings which are still seen by many as inherently unsustainable. The year 2008 presented a unique standpoint in global history, as for the first time half the world’s population – some 3.3 billion people – lived in urban areas. According to the United Nations, 193,107 new city dwellers are added to this figure every day, meaning urban populations will nearly double by 2050. Where will these people live, work, play? It is clear the tall building could play a role in this, providing dense sustainable living and compact cities with reduced transportation emissions. However, despite this potential, the majority of tall buildings completed today continue to be designed with too little consideration of environment and sustainability. The importance of improving tall building sustainability then cannot be denied and frenzied research has – and continues to be – undertaken in order to improve their sustainable credentials. Much of the research to date has focussed on reducing the environmental impacts associated with the operation of tall buildings, that is reducing the energy required for (and emissions released from) activities such as space conditioning, lighting, equipment operation, water supply and water heating that occur on a day-to-day basis. Out of this research has emerged numerous tall building proposals and built projects that claim to have significantly reduced operating energy requirements. Whilst these advancements are vital for creating sustainable tall buildings, they are in themselves not enough. Energy is also required, and emissions also released, through the production, transportation and assembly of materials and components into functioning buildings (known as embodied energy / carbon), and little work has been undertaken to establish the importance of these environmental impacts in the high-rise typology. Sustainability is a holistic concept, encompassing economic, social and environmental issues, so clearly the challenge to create truly sustainable tall buildings goes far beyond energy efficiency alone. This thesis then explores sustainability in tall buildings in the broader sense, encompassing environmental, social and economic issues, examining the links between these areas and how changes driven by the influence of one can impact the others. It consists of an Extended Abstract and five published papers which together describe the quest the author has undertaken to identify opportunities and challenges for the creation of more sustainable high-rise architecture. Note: For copyright reasons, only the Extended Abstract document is included here in this online version

Spatial openness and student activities in an atrium: A parametric evaluation of a social informal learning environment

The use of atria for students' informal learning activities is becoming a common architectural design strategy in contemporary higher education buildings, especially in dense urban settings. However, while researchers have focused on the relationship between students' perception, preferences and behaviours in social learning spaces, the spatial attributes themselves tend to be neglected in the literature. By exploiting digital spatial analysis tools, this paper uses the parameters of 'viewing volume' and 'viewing area' to compare the spatial openness of different spaces within an atrium in a higher education institution. Timeframe capture and interviews are also employed to record the distribution of student activities. The spatial attributes of the atrium and the distribution of student activities are analysed to explore links between the two. The results indicate that the viewing volume in the two-storey-height space is the highest, while viewing area in the staircase space is the highest. These spaces tended to coincide with higher frequencies of 'see and be seen' activities, such as students waiting and looking around (71.54% and 56.32% respectively). The standard deviations of the mean viewing volume and viewing area are the greatest in the three-storey space, suggesting a diversity of spatial openness. This coincided with the highest frequency of activities that require social interactions, such as gathering and group study (92.40% and 58.10% respectively). These findings suggest that spatial openness can impact student activities in an educational setting, and an atrium specifically. These novel methods also open new horizons for interpreting spatial structure in architecture

The impact of the building envelope on the energy efficiency of residential tall buildings in Saudi Arabia

In this paper, the authors explored the hypothesis that the most common approach to improve a building’s energy efficiency in the hot climate of Saudi Arabia, which focuses on engineering parameters, is not sufficient and architectural design parameters should be adopted to reduce cooling loads. In order to investigate this hypothesis, 27 sets of dynamic thermal simulations were compared. The best and worst combinations of glazing ratio, wall and glazing type were identified in order to understand the most influential parameter impacting the cooling energy loads in the building. The findings demonstrated that the reliance on a prescriptive approach for building envelope ‘engineering parameters’ specifications does not achieve the required levels of energy efficiency, and the thoughtful consideration of the ‘design parameters’, such as shading elements, could have a significant impact on cooling energy loads

Informal Learning Spaces in Higher Education: Student Preferences and Activities

Informal learning spaces play a significant role in enriching student experiences in learning environments. Such spaces are becoming more common, resulting in a change to the spatial configuration of built environments in higher education. However, previous research lacks methods to evaluate the influence of the spatial design characteristics of informal learning spaces on student preferences and their activities within. This paper aims to tease out the spatial design characteristics of informal learning spaces to examine how they shape students’ preferences in terms of their use of the spaces and what they do within them. The two case studies selected for this study, both in the UK, are the Diamond at the University of Sheffield, and the Newton at Nottingham Trent University. A mixed-methods study is applied, including questionnaires, observation, interviews, and focus groups. Six significant design characteristics (comfort, flexibility, functionality, spatial hierarchy, openness, and other support facilities) that influence student use of informal learning environments are identified. These can be used to inform future design strategies for other informal learning spaces in higher education

Civic republican social justice and the case of state grammar schools in England

The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which civic republican theory can provide a meaningful and useful account of social justice, one that is which holds resonance for educational debates. Recognising the need for educationalists interested in civic republicanism to pay greater attention to ideas of justice – and in particular social justice as it concerns relationships between citizens (citizen to citizen, group to group or citizen to group) – it is argued that a form of civic republicanism committed to freedom as non-domination is capable of providing a substantive model for analysing social (in)justice within educational arenas. After positioning the contribution offered here within existing educational literature on civic republicanism, salient elements of social justice as freedom as non-domination are identified. On this basis, debates concerning the existence and potential expansion of state (public) grammar schools in England are considered in relation to the account of republican social justice as non-domination. It is argued that from this republican position grammar schools (1) represent an arbitrary domination of the interests of those less well off by those with greater material and cultural capital and (2) in doing so lead to advantages for some at the expense of others. Though the focus of the paper is on grammar schools in England, it is suggested that republican justice may be a useful frame for considering similar educational cases in England and elsewhere

Neuromagnetic Evidence for Early Auditory Restoration of Fundamental Pitch

Background: Understanding the time course of how listeners reconstruct a missing fundamental component in an auditory stimulus remains elusive. We report MEG evidence that the missing fundamental component of a complex auditory stimulus is recovered in auditory cortex within 100 ms post stimulus onset. Methodology: Two outside tones of four-tone complex stimuli were held constant (1200 Hz and 2400 Hz), while two inside tones were systematically modulated (between 1300 Hz and 2300 Hz), such that the restored fundamental (also knows as ‘‘virtual pitch’’) changed from 100 Hz to 600 Hz. Constructing the auditory stimuli in this manner controls for a number of spectral properties known to modulate the neuromagnetic signal. The tone complex stimuli only diverged on the value of the missing fundamental component. Principal Findings: We compared the M100 latencies of these tone complexes to the M100 latencies elicited by their respective pure tone (spectral pitch) counterparts. The M100 latencies for the tone complexes matched their pure sinusoid counterparts, while also replicating the M100 temporal latency response curve found in previous studies. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that listeners are reconstructing the inferred pitch by roughly 100 ms after stimulus onset and are consistent with previous electrophysiological research suggesting that the inferential pitch is perceived i