Breaking new ground in mapping human settlements from space -The Global Urban Footprint-

Today 7.2 billion people inhabit the Earth and by 2050 this number will have risen to around nine billion, of which about 70 percent will be living in cities. Hence, it is essential to understand drivers, dynamics, and impacts of the human settlements development. A key component in this context is the availability of an up-to-date and spatially consistent map of the location and distribution of human settlements. It is here that the Global Urban Footprint (GUF) raster map can make a valuable contribution. The new global GUF binary settlement mask shows a so far unprecedented spatial resolution of 0.4 arcsec ($\sim12 m$) that provides - for the first time - a complete picture of the entirety of urban and rural settlements. The GUF has been derived by means of a fully automated processing framework - the Urban Footprint Processor (UFP) - that was used to analyze a global coverage of more than 180,000 TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X radar images with 3m ground resolution collected in 2011-2012. Various quality assessment studies to determine the absolute GUF accuracy based on ground truth data on the one hand and the relative accuracies compared to established settlements maps on the other hand, clearly indicate the added value of the new global GUF layer, in particular with respect to the representation of rural settlement patterns. Generally, the GUF layer achieves an overall absolute accuracy of about 85\%, with observed minima around 65\% and maxima around 98 \%. The GUF will be provided open and free for any scientific use in the full resolution and for any non-profit (but also non-scientific) use in a generalized version of 2.8 arcsec ($\sim84m$). Therewith, the new GUF layer can be expected to break new ground with respect to the analysis of global urbanization and peri-urbanization patterns, population estimation or vulnerability assessment

Entwicklung eines mehrstufigen Gegentaktdurchflusswandlers hoher Leistung mit weitem Eingangsspannungsbereich und bidirektionalem Leistungsfluss

Transformer coupled multiport DC/DC converter with bidirectional power flow have proven to be an efficient approach to integrate varying sources and storage elements in a sustainable energy generation system. This work presents a Triple Active Bridge converter wherein two ports are wide input range DC links and the third port is optimized for a 48 V battery system. The wide input range DC links are designed for voltages that can be varied between 200 V and 1000 V. To optimize efficiency over the whole operating area, a five winding transformer is developed whose windings can be selected separately to use the optimal transformer turns ratio depending on the three different DC voltages. The converter is capable to transfer power of up to 12 kW with an arbitrary direction of power flow. The construction of the Triple Active Bridge converter is demonstrated. First the required components are designed. Thenceforth the design process is validated by a simulation. Subsequently a schematic of the whole converter is developed. Based on the schematic a PCB Layout is designed, manufactured and assembled. Finally the converter is tested

Особенности продвижения образовательных услуг ТПУ на китайском рынке

В статье рассмотрены особенности продвижения образовательных услуг ТПУ на китайском рынке, приведены доводы целесообразности выхода университета на международную арену, описаны способы, с помощью которых ТПУ предоставляет свои услуги. На базе данных характеристик проводится маркетинговое исследование информационной обеспеченности университета

The Impact of Guide Tubes on Flow Separation in Rocket Nozzles

Rocket engine test facilities and launch pads are typically equipped with a guide tube. Its purpose is to ensure the controlled and safe routing of the hot exhaust gases. In addition, the guide tube induces a suction that effects the nozzle flow, namely the flow separation during transient start-up and shut-down of the engine. A cold flow subscale nozzle in combination with a set of guide tubes was studied experimentally to determine the main influencing parameters

New Enabling Technologies to Observe and Characterise Urban Environments with Big Data from Space – the Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform

Modern Earth Observation (EO) satellite missions provide valuable opportunities to support sustainable urban planning and management by delivering dedicated information on the spatiotemporal development of the built environment and its key morphological and physical characteristics such as imperviousness, greenness, built-up density, building volume, albedo – from global down to local scale. However, the transformation of the raw EO imagery into ready-to-use thematic data and indicators for scientist or planners on the one hand and actionable information for decision makers on the other hand requires detailed technical expert knowledge. Moreover, the imagery collected by satellite missions such as the US Landsat program or the European fleet of Sentinel satellites, but also by airborne systems or drones, rapidly adds up to a multiple of the data volume that can effectively be handled with standard work stations and software solutions. Hence, this contribution introduces the Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (https://urban-tep.eo.esa.int) that utilizes modern information and communication technology to bridge the gap between the mass data collections of the technology-driven EO sector and the demand of science, planning, and policy for up-to-date information on the status, properties and dynamics of the urban system. Key components of the Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (U-TEP) are an open, web-based portal that is connected to distributed high-level computing clusters and clouds and that also provides key functionalities for i) high-performance data access, analysis and visualization, ii) customized development and sharing of algorithms, products and services, and iii) networking, communication and exchange of data and information. The overarching objective here is to enable any interested (non-expert) user to easily generate actionable indicators and information for effective sustainable urban development based on a joint analysis of various data sources such as official survey data, EO mission data, socio-economic statistics, and data collected via social media or citizen science. So far more than 3.5 PB of data have been processed and analyzed by means of the U-TEP to finally provide a broad spectrum of urban information products and related services for visualization and analytics that have yet successfully been used by more than 240 institutions (science, planning, NGOs, policy) from 41 countries (i.a. World Bank Group, United Nations, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Food Programme, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Group on Earth Observation, Global Platform for Sustainable Cities)

Design Study of a 30kN LOX/LCH4 Aerospike Rocket Engine for Lunar Lander Application

Based on lunar lander concept EL3, various LOX/CH4 aerospike engines were studied. A distinction was made between single and cluster configurations as well as ideal and non-ideal contour concepts. It could be shown that non-ideal aerospike engines promise a significant payload gain