Resilient cooling strategies – A critical review and qualitative assessment

The global effects of climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as heatwaves and power outages, which have consequences for buildings and their cooling systems. Buildings and their cooling systems should be designed and operated to be resilient under such events to protect occupants from potentially dangerous indoor thermal conditions. This study performed a critical review on the state-of-the-art of cooling strategies, with special attention to their performance under heatwaves and power outages. We proposed a definition of resilient cooling and described four criteria for resilience—absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, restorative capacity, and recovery speed —and used them to qualitatively evaluate the resilience of each strategy. The literature review and qualitative analyses show that to attain resilient cooling, the four resilience criteria should be considered in the design phase of a building or during the planning of retrofits. The building and relevant cooling system characteristics should be considered simultaneously to withstand extreme events. A combination of strategies with different resilience capacities, such as a passive envelope strategy coupled with a low-energy space-cooling solution, may be needed to obtain resilient cooling. Finally, a further direction for a quantitative assessment approach has been pointed out

Epidemiological and Clinicopathological Characteristics of Lung Cancer in a Teaching Hospital in Iran

Background: Lung cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers and the most frequent cause of cancer-related death worldwide. In Iran, it ranks second and third as the cancer-causing death in men and women, respectively. We carried out this study to find out the demographic, clinical, and histological characteristics and risk factors of lung cancer in a referral tertiary center in Iran. Materials and Methods: A retrospective study was conducted on cases of primary lung cancer based on the results of registered cancer reports of cytological and pathological specimens between March 2001 and March 2012. Demographic variables, clinical manifestations, histology and location of tumors were determined based on the data found in the medical records of each patient. Definite or probable etiologic factors were identified. Data analysis was performed with SPSS version 16 and a p-value ≤0.05 was considered as significant. Results: A total of 203 patients, with a mean age of 65.7 years (SD=11.2), with primary lung cancer were identified, 81.3% being men. Of the total, 110 cases (54.2%) were living in urban areas. In 53.2% of cases, the site of tumor was on the right side and in 72.9% of cases the lesion was centrally located. The histological types of lung cancer were squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) in 107 cases (52.7%), adenocarcinoma (AC) in 30 cases (14.8%), and small cell carcinoma (SC) in 27 cases (13.3%). Significant correlations between the gender and residence, smoking, and the histological type and location (central or peripheral) of tumor were found. The percentage of smokers was 75.2% in men and 15.8% in women. Conclusions: Smoking was the most important risk factor and squamous cell carcinoma the most common histological type of lung cancer in our study. Male sex and being a smoker was associated with histological types of SCC while being nonsmoker had relationship with adenocarcinoma. Keywords: Lung cancer - epidemiology - histological type - risk facto

International Energy Agency EBC Annex 80 - Resilient Cooling of Buildings - State of the Art Review

The world is facing a rapid increase of air conditioning of buildings. This is driven by multiple factors, such as urbanization and densification, climate change and elevated comfort expectations together with economic growth in hot and densely populated regions of the world. The trend towards cooling seems inexorable therefore it is mandatory to guide this development towards sustainable solutions. Against this background, it is the motivation of Annex 80 to develop, assess and communicate solutions of resilient cooling and overheating protection. Resilient Cooling is used to denote low energy and low carbon cooling solutions that strengthen the ability of individuals and our community as a whole to withstand, and also prevent, thermal and other impacts of changes in global and local climates. It encompasses the assessment and Research &amp; Development of both active and passive cooling technologies of the following four groups: - Reduce heat loads to people and indoor environments. - Remove sensible heat from indoor environments. - Enhance personal comfort apart from space cooling. - Remove latent heat from indoor environments. The Annex 80’s main objective is to support a rapid transition to an environment where resilient low energy and low carbon cooling systems are the mainstream and preferred solutions for cooling and overheating issues in buildings.<br/