The emergence of battery electric vehicles: A NZ manufacturing opportunity?

Personal passenger transport faces several challenges in the coming decades: depletion of cheap oil reserves, increasing congestion, localised pollution, the need for reduced carbon emissions and the long term goal of sustainability. One way of solving some of these problems could be to introduce comfortable, energy efficient, battery electric vehicles. Currently, hybrid vehicles have been presented as a means to reducing the transportation related oil demand. New developments in materials and technologies have made them, cleaner and safer as well as more fuel efficient. However, hybrids will only prolong the use of oil until alternatively fuelled vehicles are developed. One long term alternative is the battery electric vehicle (BEV). A BEV designed to be light, aerodynamic with high efficiency drive train and latest battery technology would have a performance comparable to a typical internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV). Recent developments in virtual engineering, rapid prototyping and advanced manufacturing might enable low-cost development of niche market BEV’s designed and built in New Zealand for export markets. This work examines the collaborative development of a twin seat BEV using new materials and latest technologies by the University of Waikato’s Engineering Department and a group of NZ and foreign companies. The car will be used to research the potential of BEVs and will also compete in the Commuter Class of the World Solar Challenge in 2007

Why precipitation and forest structure are changing in the eastern US: insight from analysis of large empirical and climate model datasets

Improved projections of future climate trends, climate extremes and ecological responses are critical to inform policy and natural resource management aimed at sustainability and preparedness. Considerable attention has been focused on understanding drought, due to concerns over crop yield and forest mortality. However, some regions, such as the eastern US, have experienced increased summer precipitation over the past half century and the causes and ecological implications are not well understood. Greenhouse gases and regional effects of agricultural irrigation have been shown to be primary drivers of precipitation enhancement, although far-downstream effects of irrigation on moist, forested regions remain unclear. In addition, correctly anticipating forest responses to increasing precipitation, and other aspects of a changing climate, requires understanding the interaction of long-term successional processes across regional-to-continental spatial scales. Here I, 1) investigated how agricultural irrigation enhances regional and far-downstream precipitation; and, 2) developed a new data-driven model of forest dynamics that quantifies compositional and structural response to competition, disturbance, and climate anomalies. This work combined modeling experiments using the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) community earth system model (CESM) and analysis of large long-term datasets from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and US Forest Service (USFS) forest inventory and analysis (FIA). Results indicated that moisture advection from irrigation in the western U.S. enhances stratiform precipitation in the densely populated greater New York City region, where very-heavy precipitation events were 11% more intense and occurred 23% more frequently. Forest modeling provided validation and quantification of fundamental ideas underlying forest succession (e.g., self-thinning, resource limitation tolerance) and revealed increased summer precipitation may enhance forest net primary productivity up to +32% (+0.52±0.08 Mg C ha-1 yr-1). However, climate warming was associated with increased occurrence of weather disturbances and disease resulting in reduced productivity by as much as -29% (-0.55 ±0.08 Mg C ha-1 yr-1). Well-known successional shifts in species-group dominance were attributed to disturbance susceptibility and a gradient of tolerance to resource limitation. Collectively this work provides new insight for climate mitigation efforts, robust comparisons for global vegetation models, and context for water resource and forest management

Frame Multiplication Theory for Vector-valued Harmonic Analysis

A tight frame is a sequence in a separable Hilbert space satisfying the frame inequality with equal upper and lower bounds and possessing a simple reconstruction formula. We define and study the theory of frame multiplication in finite dimensions. A frame multiplication for a frame is a binary operation on the frame elements that extends to a bilinear vector product on the entire Hilbert space. This is made possible, in part, by the reconstruction property of frames. The motivation for this work is the desire to define meaningful vector-valued versions of the discrete Fourier transform and the discrete ambiguity function. We make these definitions and prove several familiar harmonic analysis results in this context. These definitions beget the questions we answer through developing frame multiplication theory. For certain binary operations, those with the Latin square property, we give a characterization of the frames, in terms of their Gramians, that have these frame multiplications. Combining finite dimensional representation theory and Naimark's theorem, we show frames possessing a group frame multiplication are the projections of an orthonormal basis onto the isotypic components of the regular representations. In particular, for a finite group G, we prove there are only finitely many inequivalent frames possessing the group operation of G as a frame multiplication, and we give an explicit formula for the dimensions in which these frames exist. Finally, we connect our theory to a recently studied class of frames; we prove that frames possessing a group frame multiplication are the central G-frames, a class of frames generated by groups of operators on a Hilbert space

Agreement of Air Bike and Treadmill Protocols To Assess Maximal Oxygen Uptake: An Exploratory Study

International Journal of Exercise Science 17(4): 633-647, 2024. Maximal oxygen consumption (V̇O2max) is an important measure of aerobic fitness, with applications in evaluating fitness, designing training programs, and assessing overall health. While treadmill assessments are considered the gold standard, airbikes (ABs) are increasingly popular exercise machines. However, limited research exists on AB-based V̇O2max assessments, particularly regarding agreement with treadmill graded exercise tests. To address this gap, a randomized crossover study was conducted, involving 15 healthy adults (9M, 6F, 7 familiar with AB) aged 30.1 ± 8.6 years. Paired t-tests, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), Bland-Altman and Principal component (PC) analyses were used to assess agreement between protocols. The results demonstrated good to excellent agreement in V̇O2max, maximum heart rate (HR), and rating of perceived exertion (ICC range: 0.89-0.92). However, significant differences were observed in several measures, including V̇O2max and maximum HR (p \u3c 0.01). Overall a systematic bias 3.31 mL/kg/min (treadmill \u3e AB, 95%CI[1.67,4.94]) was observed, no proportional bias was present; however, regular AB users (systematic bias: 1.27 (95%CI[0.20,2.34]) mL/kg/min) exhibited higher agreement in V̇O2max measures compared to non-regular users (systematic bias: 5.09 (95%CI[3.69,6.49]) mL/kg/min). There were no significant differences in cardiorespiratory coordination, between the AB and the treadmill. These findings suggest that for individuals familiar with the AB, it can be a suitable alternative for assessing V̇O2max compared to the treadmill. Future research with larger samples should focus on developing prediction equations for field AB tests to predict V̇O2max. Practitioners should consider using the AB to assess V̇O2max in individuals who prefer it over running

Examination of potential novel biochemical factors in relation to prostate cancer incidence and mortality in UK Biobank

Background: Although prostate cancer is a leading cause of cancer death, its aetiology is not well understood. We aimed to identify novel biochemical factors for prostate cancer incidence and mortality in UK Biobank. Methods: A range of cardiovascular, bone, joint, diabetes, renal and liver-related biomarkers were measured in baseline blood samples collected from up to 211,754 men at recruitment and in a subsample 5 years later. Participants were followed-up via linkage to health administrative datasets to identify prostate cancer cases. Hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals were calculated using multivariable-adjusted Cox regression corrected for regression dilution bias. Multiple testing was accounted for by using a false discovery rate controlling procedure. Results: After an average follow-up of 6.9 years, 5763 prostate cancer cases and 331 prostate cancer deaths were ascertained. Prostate cancer incidence was positively associated with circulating vitamin D, urea and phosphate concentrations and inversely associated with glucose, total protein and aspartate aminotransferase. Phosphate and cystatin-C were the only biomarkers positively and inversely, respectively, associated with risk in analyses excluding the first 4 years of follow-up. There was little evidence of associations with prostate cancer death. Conclusion: We found novel associations of several biomarkers with prostate cancer incidence. Future research will examine associations by tumour characteristics.</p