Enabling low-carbon living in new UK housing developments

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe a tool (the Climate Challenge Tool) that allows house builders to calculate whole life carbon equivalent emissions and costs of various carbon and energy reduction options that can be incorporated into the design of new developments. Design/methodology/approach: The tool covers technical and soft (or lifestyle) measures for reducing carbon production and energy use. Energy used within the home, energy embodied in the building materials, and emissions generated through transport, food consumption and waste treatment are taken into account. The tool has been used to assess the potential and cost-effectiveness of various carbon reduction options for a proposed new housing development in Cambridgeshire. These are compared with carbon emissions from a typical UK household. Findings: The tool demonstrated that carbon emission reductions can be achieved at much lower costs through an approach which enables sustainable lifestyles than through an approach which focuses purely on reducing heat lost through the fabric of the building and from improving the heating and lighting systems. Practical implications: The tool will enable house builders to evaluate which are the most cost-effective measures that they can incorporate into the design of new developments in order to achieve the significant energy savings and reduction in carbon emissions necessary to meet UK Government targets and to avoid dangerous climate change. Originality/value: Current approaches to assessing carbon and energy reduction options for new housing developments concentrate on energy efficiency options such as reducing heat lost through the fabric of the building and improving the heating and lighting systems, alongside renewable energy systems. The Climate Challenge Tool expands the range of options that might be considered by developers to include those affecting lifestyle choices of future residents. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Solutions to climate change in UK housing developments: a lifestyle approach

This thesis is concerned with how sustainable and low carbon living can be enabled in new housing developments in the UK. The consumption of energy and resources is not just related to the insulating qualities of the fabric of the building and the heating, lighting, appliances and ventilation systems that go into the building, but also to the occupancy patterns and activities of future residents over the long-term. Conventional business models for new housing development, operating under current government regulations, policies and targets have failed to develop housing which encourages the adoption of sustainable lifestyles taking whole life consumption into account. This thesis aims to identify alternative ways in which UK housing development can contribute to achieving 80% carbon savings in the UK by 2050. A tool (the Climate Challenge Tool) has been developed allowing whole-life carbon equivalent emissions and costs of various options for new developments to be calculated. These cover technical and soft measures; energy used within the home, energy embodied in the building materials and emissions from transport, food and waste treatment. Applying the tool to a case study development, it was found that carbon reductions can be achieved at much lower costs through an approach, which enables sustainable lifestyles, rather than one that purely focuses on technical measures such as those covered in the building regulations. Furthermore a wider sustainability analysis showed additional social and economic benefits from many of the lifestyles measures. A specific opportunity to incorporate lifestyles measures into new developments was identified: Eco-self-build housing communities. The feasibility of this opportunity was assessed through a stakeholder survey and was judged to be viable. It is concluded that with additional government support or removal of regulatory barriers, eco-self-build communities has the potential to contribute considerably to an 80% emission reduction target

A Cantor set of tori with monodromy near a focus-focus singularity

We write down an asymptotic expression for action coordinates in an integrable Hamiltonian system with a focus-focus equilibrium. From the singularity in the actions we deduce that the Arnol'd determinant grows infinitely large near the pinched torus. Moreover, we prove that it is possible to globally parametrise the Liouville tori by their frequencies. If one perturbs this integrable system, then the KAM tori form a Whitney smooth family: they can be smoothly interpolated by a torus bundle that is diffeomorphic to the bundle of Liouville tori of the unperturbed integrable system. As is well-known, this bundle of Liouville tori is not trivial. Our result implies that the KAM tori have monodromy. In semi-classical quantum mechanics, quantisation rules select sequences of KAM tori that correspond to quantum levels. Hence a global labeling of quantum levels by two quantum numbers is not possible.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

Mapping the Spread of Malaria Drug Resistance

Tim Anderson discusses a new study of molecular variation in alleles at the dihydropteroate synthase locus, which underlies resistance to sulfadoxine, in over 5,000 parasites from 50 locations

Multi-site breathers in Klein-Gordon lattices: stability, resonances, and bifurcations

We prove the most general theorem about spectral stability of multi-site breathers in the discrete Klein-Gordon equation with a small coupling constant. In the anti-continuum limit, multi-site breathers represent excited oscillations at different sites of the lattice separated by a number of "holes" (sites at rest). The theorem describes how the stability or instability of a multi-site breather depends on the phase difference and distance between the excited oscillators. Previously, only multi-site breathers with adjacent excited sites were considered within the first-order perturbation theory. We show that the stability of multi-site breathers with one-site holes change for large-amplitude oscillations in soft nonlinear potentials. We also discover and study a symmetry-breaking (pitchfork) bifurcation of one-site and multi-site breathers in soft quartic potentials near the points of 1:3 resonance.Comment: 34 pages, 12 figure

Unoccupied states of individual silver clusters and chains on Ag(111)

Size-selected silver clusters on Ag(111) were fabricated with the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. Unoccupied electron resonances give rise to image contrast and spectral features which shift toward the Fermi level with increasing cluster size. Linear assemblies exhibit higher resonance energies than equally sized compact assemblies. Density functional theory calculations reproduce the observed energies and enable an assignment of the resonances to hybridized atomic 5s and 5p orbitals with silver substrate states.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure