Solar Control in Buidings with Large Glazed Surfaces : The Role of Internal Screens

A large part of new office buildings is characterized by extended external glazed surfaces, generally located without any care about orientation. Without a suitable solar control strategy, this fact implies a series of well-known problems: high-energy demand and consequent carbon dioxide emissions for HVAC, as well as thermal and luminous discomfort. Moreover, if the working room is large, the values of physical parameters influencing comfort are relevantly variable from point to point. The best way to control entering solar radiation is based on the use of external movable elements, such as slats or screens. However, in some winter periods, it would be appreciated to promote the collection of solar radiation in order to contribute to cover heating loads. In this case, the use of internal diffusing or redirecting elements (i.e., blinds or venetian curtains) is necessary to avoid glare phenomena. The physical properties of these elements influence the room thermal balance, and their temperatures influence indoor thermal comfort conditions, particularly for the nearest occupants. This work tries to identify, by means of computer simulations, optimal physical properties of some kinds of internal diffusing screens. A case study has been examined: it consists in a medium size office roo

A CNN-based fusion method for feature extraction from sentinel data

Sensitivity to weather conditions, and specially to clouds, is a severe limiting factor to the use of optical remote sensing for Earth monitoring applications. A possible alternative is to benefit from weather-insensitive synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. In many real-world applications, critical decisions are made based on some informative optical or radar features related to items such as water, vegetation or soil. Under cloudy conditions, however, optical-based features are not available, and they are commonly reconstructed through linear interpolation between data available at temporally-close time instants. In this work, we propose to estimate missing optical features through data fusion and deep-learning. Several sources of information are taken into account—optical sequences, SAR sequences, digital elevation model—so as to exploit both temporal and cross-sensor dependencies. Based on these data and a tiny cloud-free fraction of the target image, a compact convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained to perform the desired estimation. To validate the proposed approach, we focus on the estimation of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), using coupled Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time-series acquired over an agricultural region of Burkina Faso from May–November 2016. Several fusion schemes are considered, causal and non-causal, single-sensor or joint-sensor, corresponding to different operating conditions. Experimental results are very promising, showing a significant gain over baseline methods according to all performance indicators

Urban Covered Courtyards in Mediterranean Climates : a method for optimizing environmental control strategy

Covering urban courtyards allows you to create interesting public or semi-public spaces, sheltered from bad weather and possibly with a controlled climate. In addition, the use of a transparent or semi-transparent roof allows you to take advantage of natural lighting. The use of this type of roof is a common solution in the countries of central and northern Europe, but difficult to apply in Mediterranean temperate climates, because it would cause overheating for a good part of the year. This unless appropriate solar control strategies. In this work, a case study was taken into consideration. It is the courtyard of a former Venetian convent. With reference to it, some types of partially transparent roofing and some solar control strategies were compared by means of computer simulations. The various solutions were compared from the point of view of visual and thermal comfort, as well as from that of primary energy demand for supplementary artificial lighting and possible energy demand for heating, ventilation and air conditioning if the relative system is present. Given the diffusion of this type of courtyards in the Italian territory, its thermal and luminous behavior has also been simulated in the warmer climate of Palermo. Simulation’s results show that the better solutions are those based on the use of dynamic solar control devices

Effect of cosurfactant on the supramolecular structure and physicochemical properties of non-ionic biocompatible microemulsions

Microemulsões são sistemas transparentes, homogêneos e termodinamicamente estáveis, formados espontaneamente, sob determinadas condições experimentais, a partir de misturas de água e fase oleosa estabilizadas por tensoativo ou por mistura de tensoativo e cotensoativo. Esses sistemas exibem propriedades diferenciadas, as quais os tornam particularmente interessantes como sistemas de liberação, principalmente pelas vias oral e tópica. Nesse trabalho foi estudado o domínio da existência de sistemas microemulsionados não iônicos, através de diagramas de fase pseudo-ternários. Os resultados mostraram uma grande área de domínio para microemulsões O/A e A/O, onde A e O referem-se a água e óleo, respectivamente. Dependendo das proporções dos componentes, a viscosidade aparente dos sistemas variou significantemente. Foi determinado que a presença de etanol como cotensoativo modificou as propriedades físico-químicas dos sistemas, particularmente da viscosidade aparente e da densidade relativa. A análise dos dados mostrou que o sistema estudado comporta-se como um fluido não-Newtoniano pseudoplástico próprio para aplicações farmacêuticas e cosméticas.Microemulsions are transparent, homogeneous and thermodynamically stable systems, formed spontaneously under a specific set of experimental conditions from mixtures of water and oil phases stabilized by a surfactant or a mixture of surfactant and cosurfactant. These systems exhibit some unique properties that make them particularly interesting as delivery systems, as much for the oral as for the topical route. In the present work, we have studied the domain of existence of non-ionic microemulsion systems within pseudo-ternary phase diagrams. The results show a large area of microemulsion domain for O/W and W/O microemulsions. Depending on the proportion of components the apparent viscosity of the systems varied significantly. We have found that the presence of ethanol as cosurfactant affects the physical properties particularly the apparent viscosity and relative density. Analysis of the data indicated that the studied systems behave as non-Newtonian pseudoplastic shear-thinning fluids appropriated for pharmaceutical and cosmetic applications

The quest of modern Brazilian fashion at Instituto de Arte Contemporânea at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (IAC- Masp) between 1950 and 1953

Trata-se de estudo sobre a importância histórica de iniciativas e obras em relação à moda moderna brasileira, no espaço pioneiro do Instituto de Arte Contemporânea do Museu de Arte de São Paulo (IAC-Masp) no contexto de suas atividades entre 1950 e 1953. Análise baseada no periódico Habitat, principal órgão modernista do Masp, bem como na revista O Cruzeiro. Foi proposto contribuir com a abordagem desse capítulo da moda moderna brasileira, pouco valorizado, mas relevante naquele contexto bem como nos dias atuais. The article discusses the historical relevance for initiative and costumes related to the Brazilian modernist fashion, in to the pioneer Instituto de Arte Contemporânea from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo – IAC-Masp – in the context of it’s activities between 1950 and 1953. It was analyzed the Habitat magazine and O Cruzeiro magazine. On this way, it was proposed to show the contribution of this period in the Brazilian modernist fashion, not valorized, but relevant in that time and until nowadays.&nbsp