How can the UK road system be adapted to the impacts posed by climate change? By creating a climate adaptation framework

This paper aims to analyse the impacts of climate change to the current and predicted future situations of road transportation in the UK and evaluate the corresponding adaptation plans to cope with them. A conceptual framework of long-term adaptation planning for climate change in road systems is proposed to ensure the resilience and sustainability of road transport systems under various climate risks such as flooding and increased temperature. To do so, an advanced Fuzzy Bayesian Reasoning (FBR) model is first employed to evaluate the climate risks in the UK road transport networks. This modelling approach can tackle the high uncertainty in risk data and thus facilitate the development of the climate adaptation framework and its application in the UK road sector. To examine the feasibility of this model, a nationwide survey is conducted among the stakeholders to analyse the climate risks, in terms of the timeframe of climate threats, the likelihood of occurrence, the severity of consequences, and infrastructure resilience. From the modelling perspective, this work brings novelty by expanding the risk attribute “the severity of consequence” into three sub-attributes including economic loss, damage to the environment, and injuries and/or loss of life. It advances the-state-of-the-art technique in the current relevant literature from a single to multiple tier climate risk modelling structure. Secondly, an Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach is used to prioritise the best adaptation measure(s) by considering both the risk analysis results from the FBR and the implementation costs simultaneously. The main new contributions of this part lie in the rich raw data collected from the real world to provide useful practical insights for achieving road resilience when facing increasing climate risk challenges. During this process, a qualitative analysis of several national reports regarding the impacts posed by climate change, risk assessment and adaptation measures in the UK road sector is conducted for the relevant decision data (i.e. risk and cost). It is also supplemented by an in-depth interview with a senior planner from Highways England. The findings provide road planners and decision makers with useful insights on identification and prioritisation of climate threats as well as selection of cost-effective climate adaptation measures to rationalise adaptation planning. © 2019 Elsevier Lt

Optical multisensors based on surface plasmon resonance

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000Biosensors based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) detect biological substances through changes in the refractive index (RI) at the sensor surface. We present two optical multisensors designed to improve the robustness of SPR sensing.Bulk RI interference is a serious drawback of SPR sensing. It has limited the application of SPR to laboratory experiments in which the bulk RI is kept constant. An SPR instrument can solve the problem of bulk RI effects by simultaneously measuring both the SPR response and the bulk RI of the analyte. In our SPR/internal reflection refractometry (IRR) sensor, the bulk RI is measured by critical angle refractometry. In experiments which investigated the ability of the instrument to compensate for bulk effects due to solution composition and temperature, the instrument was found to eliminate 85% to 99% of bulk RI interference.The SPR/IRR sensor must make high quality measurements of surface RI and bulk RI to realize the benefits of critical angle compensation. These measurements are performed under difficult conditions: the functionalized SPR sensor surface is prone to drift, and the sensor's cost must be minimized. We describe data analysis and calibration techniques which use linear algorithms combined with calibration measurements to produce high quality data under these circumstances.The SPR/IRR instrument demonstrates that a sensor which combines two sensing techniques can produce more robust measurements than an instrument which relies upon a single technique. We present a new SPR sensor which retains and enhances this multisensing capability in a streamlined configuration. The sensor is based on capillary tubes internally coated with gold. A focused laser beam strikes the capillary radially and is reflected from the interior surface at a range of angles. The reflected light is then intercepted by an array detector. The versatile optics of capillaries allow the implementation of several types of optical sensing, including critical angle measurement of bulk RI.Theory, modeling, fabrication, and characterization techniques for SPR capillary sensors are presented. Two techniques for depositing gold in capillaries were found to produce gold layers usable for SPR sensing