Residential green is associated with reduced annoyance to road traffic and railway noise but increased annoyance to aircraft noise exposure

In recent years, residential green and availability of neighbourhood green spaces came into focus as a potential means to reduce transportation noise annoyance. Literature suggests that various characteristics of residential green may play a role, namely, greenness of the residential areas as quantified by the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), visible vegetation from home, and the presence of public green spaces as identified by land use classification data (LU-green), as well as their accessibility and noise pollution (i.e., transportation noise exposure within green areas, how loud/quiet they are). So far, studies mostly focused on road traffic noise in urban areas.; We investigated the effects of residential green on noise annoyance, accounting for different transportation noise sources as well as for the degree of urbanisation.; We complemented the data set of the recent Swiss SiRENE survey on road traffic, railway and aircraft noise annoyance with a wide range of "green" metrics, and investigated their association with annoyance by means of logistic regression analysis (generalized estimating equations).; Increasing residential green was found to be associated with reduced road traffic and railway noise annoyance, but increased aircraft noise annoyance. The overall effect corresponded to equivalent level reductions of about 6 dB for road traffic and 3 dB for railway noise, but to an increase of about 10 dB for aircraft noise, when residential green increased from "not much green" (5th percentile of the study sample distribution) to "a lot of green" (95th percentile). Overall, NDVI and LU-green were particularly strongly linked to annoyance. The effects of visible vegetation from home and accessibility and/or quietness of green spaces were, overall, less strong, but depended on the degree of urbanisation. For road traffic noise, visible vegetation and accessibility of green spaces seem to particularly strongly reduce annoyance in cities, while quiet green spaces are more effective in rural areas.; Our study emphasizes that residential green should be fostered by city planners, particularly in densely populated areas

Measuring soot particles from automotive exhaust emissions

The European Metrology Research Programme participating countries and the European Union jointly fund a three year project to address the need of the automotive industry for a metrological sound base for exhaust measurements. The collaborative work on particle emissions involves five European National Metrology Institutes, the Tampere University of Technology, the Joint Research Centre for Energy and Transport and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research. On one hand, a particle number and size standard for soot particles is aimed for. Eventually this will allow the partners to provide accurate and comparable calibrations of measurement instruments for the type approval of Euro 5b and Euro 6 vehicles. Calibration aerosols of combustion particles, silver and graphite proof partially suitable. Yet, a consensus choice together with instrument manufactures is pending as the aerosol choice considerably affects the number concentration measurement. Furthermore, the consortium issued consistent requirements for novel measuring instruments foreseen to replace today’s opacimeters in regulatory periodic emission controls of soot and compared them with European legislative requirements. Four partners are conducting a metrological validation of prototype measurement instruments. The novel instruments base on light scattering, electrical, ionisation chamber and diffusion charging sensors and will be tested at low and high particle concentrations. Results shall allow manufacturers to further improve their instruments to comply with legal requirements

CMS physics technical design report : Addendum on high density QCD with heavy ions

Peer reviewe

Research and Design of a Routing Protocol in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

无线传感器网络，作为全球未来十大技术之一，集成了传感器技术、嵌入式计算技术、分布式信息处理和自组织网技术，可实时感知、采集、处理、传输网络分布区域内的各种信息数据，在军事国防、生物医疗、环境监测、抢险救灾、防恐反恐、危险区域远程控制等领域具有十分广阔的应用前景。 本文研究分析了无线传感器网络的已有路由协议，并针对大规模的无线传感器网络设计了一种树状路由协议，它根据节点地址信息来形成路由，从而简化了复杂繁冗的路由表查找和维护，节省了不必要的开销，提高了路由效率，实现了快速有效的数据传输。 为支持此路由协议本文提出了一种自适应动态地址分配算——ADAR（AdaptiveDynamicAddre...As one of the ten high technologies in the future, wireless sensor network, which is the integration of micro-sensors, embedded computing, modern network and Ad Hoc technologies, can apperceive, collect, process and transmit various information data within the region. It can be used in military defense, biomedical, environmental monitoring, disaster relief, counter-terrorism, remote control of haz...学位：工学硕士院系专业：信息科学与技术学院通信工程系_通信与信息系统学号：2332007115216

Validation of the sonAIR aircraft noise simulation model

sonAIR is a recently developed aircraft noise simulation model designed for single flight simulation while still being applicable for calculation of entire airport scenarios. This paper presents a rigorous validation exercise, wherein roughly 20’000 single flights were simulated using the 22 currently available sonAIR emission models of turbofan aircraft and compared against noise measurements. The measurements were recorded with the noise monitoring terminals at Zurich and Geneva airport, Switzerland, and with additional microphones installed by the author’s institution. Data from 22 measurement positions were analyzed, covering all departure and approach routes at distances from 1.8 to 53 kilometers from the airports. sonAIR was found to be accurate for departures and approaches under different operating conditions and aircraft configuration. The mean overall differences between simulation and measurements were well below ±1 dB in terms of noise event levels, with standard deviations of ±1.7 dB respectively ±2.4 dB, depending on the model type. A few aircraft types that displayed larger deviations are discussed individually. A sensitivity analysis on the input data found the quality and level of detail of the land cover data to be critical for the simulation accuracy. Changes in other input data such as atmospheric profiles and buildings had non-significant impacts

Project STEER : Improving the EU Tyre Noise Label

Tyre/road noise is the dominant component of overall vehicle noise at medium and high speeds and for cars even at relatively low speeds. Consequently, road traffic noise can be reduced with the proliferation of quieter tyres. One way to achieve this is to give the tyre noise label greater attention among tyre and transportation consumers. Hence, the STEER project has evaluated the relevance and performance of the noise part of the European tyre label, looking at how it works in practice, analysing its uncertainties and suggesting how it can be improved. Its main finding is that the uncertainties in the measurement of noise level for the label are too high to be acceptable. This paper focuses on the solutions offered by STEER for an improved tyre label. With four main improvements, the overall uncertainty of the current procedure can be halved. A few possible future strategies to increase the market share of quieter tyres have been analysed and their effects quantified. If the tyre noise label is improved and the market share of quieter tyres can be increased, as project STEER proposes, area-wide reductions of up to 3 dB in road traffic noise emissions compared to the present situation are possible

Uncertainty Quantification of Reduced-Precision Time Series in Turbulent Channel Flow

With increased computational power through the use of arithmetic in low-precision, a relevant question is how lower precision affects simulation results, especially for chaotic systems where analytical round-off estimates are non-trivial to obtain. In this work, we consider how the uncertainty of the time series of a direct numerical simulation of turbulent channel flow at Ret = 180 is affected when restricted to a reduced-precision representation. We utilize a non-overlapping batch means estimator and find that the mean statistics can, in this case, be obtained with significantly fewer mantissa bits than conventional IEEE-754 double precision, but that the mean values are observed to be more sensitive in the middle of the channel than in the near-wall region. This indicates that using lower precision in the near-wall region, where the majority of the computational efforts are required, may benefit from low-precision floating point units found in upcoming computer hardware.</p