City-like Settlement to Industrial City: A Case of Urban Transformation in Huwei Township

[EN] City-like Settlement (German: Teilweise Stadtähnliche Siedlungen) (Schwarz, 1989; Sorre, 1952) plays an important role in the course of civilization, especially the development of industrial cities. Accordingly, this study utilizes Town-Plan Analysis (Conzen, 1960) to deconstruct the relationships between industrialization and settlement formation in order to illustrate the common origin of cities in Taiwan as a result of the emerging economy at the turn of the 20th century. The industrial city of Huwei, known as the “sugar city” with largest yields of cane sugar in Taiwan, had the largest-scale sugar refinery in pre-war East Asia (Williams, 1980). The city has grown and transformed with the factory during the four phases of morphological periods, which began at the establishment of the sugar refinery and worker housing in the middle of the fertile flooding plain in western Taiwan. The spatial arrangement was directed to operational and management efficiency, characterized by the simple grids and hierarchy of layout along the riverside. As the industry enlarged, the new urban core was planned to support the original settlement with shophouses accumulated in the small grids. Followed by postwar modernism (Schinz, 1989), the urban planning again extended the city boundary with larger and polygonal blocks. In the fourth phase, however, the sugar refinery downsized, leading to the conversion of the worker housing and the merging of the factory and the city that slowly brought to its present shape. The morphological process results in the concentric structure from the sugar refinery, providing valuable references for the preservation of the sugar industry townscape, and unveils the influence of industrialization as well as the special urban development pattern in Taiwan.Chen, C.; Chen, C. (2018). City-like Settlement to Industrial City: A Case of Urban Transformation in Huwei Township. En 24th ISUF International Conference. Book of Papers. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 833-841. https://doi.org/10.4995/ISUF2017.2017.5923OCS83384

Simple models of the hydrofracture process

Hydrofracturing to recover natural gas and oil relies on the creation of a fracture network with pressurized water. We analyze the creation of the network in two ways. First, we assemble a collection of analytical estimates for pressure-driven crack motion in simple geometries, including crack speed as a function of length, energy dissipated by fluid viscosity and used to break rock, and the conditions under which a second crack will initiate while a first is running. We develop a pseudo-three-dimensional numerical model that couples fluid motion with solid mechanics and can generate branching crack structures not specified in advance. One of our main conclusions is that the typical spacing between fractures must be on the order of a meter, and this conclusion arises in two separate ways. First, it arises from analysis of gas production rates, given the diffusion constants for gas in the rock. Second, it arises from the number of fractures that should be generated given the scale of the affected region and the amounts of water pumped into the rock.Shell UTNational Science FoundationPhysic

Thermal Noise in Modern CMOS Technology

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From Isovist to Spatial Perception: Wayfinding in Historic Quarter

Based on the assumption that human behaviours are mainly affected by physical and animate environments, this empirical research takes the changeful and complex historical district in Tainan to observe wayfinding behaviours. An a priori analysis of the isovist fields is conducted to identify spatial characteristics. Three measures, the relative area, convexity, and circularity, are applied to scrutinize the possible stopping points, change of speed, and route choices. Accordingly, an experiment is carried out to observe spatial behaviours and different influences of social stimuli. Results show that social interactions afford groups and pairs to perform better than individual observers in wayfinding.© 2016. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creative commons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.Keywords: wayfinding; isovist; spatial perception and social stimuli; historic quarte