Impact of Street Canyon Geometry on Outdoor Thermal Comfort and Weather Parameters in Pécs

As streets cover almost twenty-five percentages of the urban open spaces, designing streets is a vital issue in creating thermal comfort for urban environmental design. The geometry of the street (height/width ratio) as well as orientation directly influences the airspeed, solar access in urban canyon and as a result thermal comfort at the pedestrian level. This study examined the street geometry case study's scenarios with different street geometries and investigates its effects on outdoor thermal comfort as well as the weather parameters. However, according to the matrix assessment conducted by the author, the vast street canyons (height/width=0.65 m/14.5 m with an orientation parallel to the prevailing wind direction achieved the best results. Nevertheless, the aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of street canyon geometry on outdoor thermal comfort and its parameters in the summertime using numerical modeling

Numerical evaluation of outdoor thermal comfort and weather parameters in summertime at Széchenyi square

Abstract Numerical research in the context of urban in a humid continental climate zone is still limited. The aim of modeling the case study is to assess the performance of outdoor thermal comfort parameters and investigate their capabilities in achieving the outdoor thermal comfort. A computer-based tool is used to quantitatively study the outdoor thermal comfort and its weather parameters. The parameters have been analyzed using ENVI-met tool and then compared against different comfort scales like relative humidity comfort scale, the predicted mean vote scale as well as other scales and standards. The results have shown that the average predicted mean vote value is +4 (very hot), the average air temperature is hot, the average wind speed is light breeze and the relative humidity falls within the comfort range. However, street orientation, shading, water bodies and plantation play a significant role in increasing and decreasing the outdoor thermal comfort

Water Body Effect on Microclimate in Summertime: A Case Study from Pécs

The relationship between water body (fountains) scale and climate parameters like wind speed, air temperature, relative humidity, as well as thermal comfort index was modeled and analyzed via Envi-met code. Taking the water impact and factors analysis as a research object, the factors mainly discussed in this research are square area to water-body area ratio and the location of the water element. However, the computational fluid dynamics simulations were conducted on the following scenarios: 3% (original base case), 6%, and 9% of the total square’s area, then the outputs of the two simulation results were compared to the original base case. The results revealed that water scale has a slight effect on the micro-climate of the built environment in the summertime in moderately warm-wet climate zone. However, it is beneficial to adjust temperature and humidity in public spaces of central European cities. Nonetheless, the main aim of this paper is to quantitatively investigate the impact of the water bodies on the urban weather parameters and human thermal comfort under the influence of different scale ratios in Pecs-Hungary

Comparative in vivo analysis of recombinant type II feline coronaviruses with truncated and completed ORF3 region.

Our previous in vitro comparative study on a feline coronavirus (FCoV) pair, differing only in the intactness of their ORF3abc regions, showed that the truncated ORF3abc plays an important role in the efficient macrophage/monocyte tropism of type II feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV). In the present study, we describe a challenge experiment with the same recombinant FCoVs in order to gain data on the in vivo characteristics on these viruses. While parent virus FIPV DF-2 developed feline infectious peritonitis in all the infected cats, its recombinant virus PBFIPV-DF-2, differing only in seven nucleotides, proved to be surprisingly low virulent, although caused an acute febrile episode similarly to the original FIPV DF-2. PBFIPV-DF-2 infection induced significantly lower virus neutralization titers than its parent virus, and lacked the second phase of viremia and development of fatal course of the disease. The recombinant PBFIPV-DF-2-R3i with completed ORF3abc gained biological properties that differentiate between the feline enteric coronavirus (FECV) and FIPV biotypes such as intensive replication in the gut, absence of viremia and weak or no serological response. Using reverse genetic approaches our study is the first experimental proof that ORF3abc is indeed responsible for the restriction of FECV replication to the intestine in vivo

Triangle percolation in mean field random graphs -- with PDE

We apply a PDE-based method to deduce the critical time and the size of the giant component of the ``triangle percolation'' on the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graph process investigated by Palla, Der\'enyi and VicsekComment: Summary of the changes made: We have changed a remark about k-clique percolation in the first paragraph. Two new paragraphs are inserted after equation (4.4) with two applications of the equation. We have changed the names of some variables in our formula

The Role of Transport Agents in MoS2 Single Crystals

We report resistivity, thermoelectric power and thermal conductivity of MoS2 single crystals prepared by chemical vapour transport (CVT) method using I2, Br2 and TeCl4 as transport agents. The material presents low-lying donor and acceptor levels, which dominate the in-plane charge transport. Intercalates into the Van der Waals gap strongly influence the inter-plane resistivity. Thermoelectric power displays the characteristics of strong electron-phonon interaction. Detailed theoretical model of thermal conductivity reveals the presence of high number of defects in the MoS2 structure. We show that these defects are inherent to CVT growth method, coming mostly from the transport agent molecules inclusion as identified by Total Reflection X-ray Fluorescence analysis (TXRF) and in-beam activation analysis (IBAA).Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Recombinant feline coronaviruses as vaccine candidates confer protection in SPF but not in conventional cats.

Feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV) is a major pathogen of Felidae. Despite the extensive efforts taken in the past decades, development of the "ideal" live attenuated FIPV vaccine was not successful yet. In the present study, we provide data of immunisation experiments with a recombinant FCoV pair differing only in the truncation (PBFIPV-DF-2) or completion (PBFIPV-DF-2-R3i) of their ORF3abc regions. In our previous in vivo studies, these viruses proved to show the characters of low virulent or avirulent FCoV phenotypes, respectively. Therefore, we hypothesised the ability of these viruses, as possible vaccine candidates, in conferring protection in specific pathogen free (SPF) Domestic Shorthair as well as in conventional purebred British Shorthair cats. In SPF cats, after two oronasal and two intramuscular vaccinations with two weeks intervals, both vaccine candidates provided 100% protection against lethal homologous challenge with the highly virulent FIPV DF-2 strain. In contrast, the conventional purebred British Shorthair cats did not develop protection when they were immunised with the same vaccination regimes. In these groups 100% of the PBFIPV-DF-2-R3i immunised animals developed antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). Prolonged survival was observed in 40% of the animals, while 60% showed fulminant disease course. Genetic and more probably immunological differences between the SPF and non-SPF purebred kittens can explain the different outcome of the vaccination experiment. Our data highlight the diverse immune responses between SPF and conventional cats and suggest a decisive role of previous infection by heterologous causative agents in the outcome of the vaccination against FIP

Color changes upon cooling of Lepidoptera scales containing photonic nanoarchitectures, and a method for identifying the changes

The effects produced by the condensation of water vapor from the environment in the various intricate nanoarchitectures occurring in the wing scales of several Lepidoptera species were investigated by controlled cooling (from 23° C, room temperature to -5 to -10° C) combined with in situ measurements of changes in the reflectance spectra. It was determined that all photonic nanoarchitectures giving a reflectance maximum in the visible range and having an open nanostructure exhibited alteration of the position of the reflectance maximum associated with the photonic nanoarchitectures. The photonic nanoarchitectures with a closed structure exhibited little to no alteration in color. Similarly, control specimens colored by pigments did not exhibit a color change under the same conditions. Hence, this method can be used to identify species with open photonic nanoarchitectures in their scales. For certain species, an almost complete disappearance of the reflectance maximum was found. All specimens recovered their original colors following warming and drying. Cooling experiments using thin copper wires demonstrated that color alterations could be limited to a width of a millimeter or less. Dried museum specimens did not exhibit color changes when cooled in the absence of a heat sink due to the low heat capacity of the wings

The spectrum of the random environment and localization of noise

We consider random walk on a mildly random environment on finite transitive d- regular graphs of increasing girth. After scaling and centering, the analytic spectrum of the transition matrix converges in distribution to a Gaussian noise. An interesting phenomenon occurs at d = 2: as the limit graph changes from a regular tree to the integers, the noise becomes localized.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur