Effectiveness of using phase change materials on reducing summer overheating issues in UK residential buildings with identification of influential factors

The UK is currently suffering great overheating issues in summer, especially in residential buildings where no air-conditioning has been installed. This overheating will seriously affect people’s comfort and even health, especially for elderly people. Phase change materials (PCMs) have been considered as a useful passive method, which absorb excessive heat when the room is hot and release the stored heat when the room is cool. This research has adopted a simulation method in Design Builder to evaluate the effectiveness of using PCMs to reduce the overheating issues in UK residential applications and has analyzed potential factors that will influence the effectiveness of overheating. The factors include environment-related (location of the building, global warming/climate change) and construction-related (location of the PCM, insulation, heavyweight/lightweight construction). This research provides useful evidence about using PCMs in UK residential applications and the results are helpful for architects and engineers to decide when and where to use PCMs in buildings to maintain a low carbon lifestyle

Precision in robotic rectal surgery using the da Vinci Xi system and integrated table motion, a technical note

<p>Forest plot in subgroup analysis of the treatment time on HDL-C.</p

Effects of flowering and podding habits on yield in Japanese modern peanut Cultivars

<p>Forest plot in analysis of ω-3 PUFA for NAFLD on TG.</p

Valence Electron Density-Dependent Pseudopermittivity for Nonlocal Effects in Optical Properties of Metallic Nanoparticles

The peak positions of localized surface plasmonic resonance (LSPR) are strongly dependent on the sizes of metallic nanoparticles. TDDFT calculations have shown a remarkable size effect for metallic nanoparticles smaller than 1 nm, because it could account for fully nonlocal effects. Due to the high resource consumption of TDDFT, several semiquantum approaches have been proposed to reduce the computation time while addressing nonlocal effects, and it is still desirable to introduce new ideas into this area since physical origins of related fields are not completely known yet. In this work, we took account of both spilling out of s-band electrons and the screening effect of d-band electrons in the LSPR phenomena and developed a model using pseudopermittivity to describe several quantum mechanical effects that contribute to nonlocal effects in LSPR. With incorporation of machine learning, this model is capable of calculating the optical response of large nanostructures above the nanometer scale. Besides successful prediction for different metallic nanoparticle monomers, the tunneling effect occurring in dimers can also be well described by using the concept of pseudopermittivity. The employing of pseudopermittivity and machine learning is expected to achieve both high accuracy and high efficiency in quantum plasmonics. It provides a new ideology in the simulation of wave–matter interactions

Principles of pharmacological modelling relevant to applications of imaging endpoints

Talk from the 23 & 24 January 2012 "GlaxoSmithKline - Neurophysics Workshop on Pharmacological MRI", an activity hosted at Warwick University and coordinated with the Neurophysics Marie Curie Initial Training Network of which GSK is a participant

Borinane Boosted Bifunctional Organocatalysts for Ultrafast Ring-Opening Polymerization of Cyclic Ethers

The design of reactive species that can either serve to initiate the ring-opening polymerization of epoxides for the synthesis of high molar mass polyethers or be alternatively used to catalyze the synthesis of polyether telechelics in the presence of chain transfer agents has long been an elusive goal. Here, we report the synthesis of a series of bifunctional borinane-based catalysts that enable the living ring-opening polymerization of epoxides with an unprecedented activity (TOF ≥ 1.8 × 105 h–1) and a molar mass up to 106 g/mol under mild conditions. When used along with chain transfer agents to generate low Mn telechelics, the same borinane-based catalysts exhibit high productivity even for loading amounts as low as 50 ppb for ethylene oxide polymerization. These newly designed catalysts also afford the polymerization of oxetane with record TOF values and molar masses

Risk Assessment and Invasion Characteristics of Alien Plants in and Around the Agro-Pastoral Ecotone of Northern China

<div><p>ABSTRACT</p><p>Two risk assessment protocols were adopted to assess the risks posed by alien plants that naturalized or non-naturalized in the agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China (AGENC). In this study the Risk Assessment for Central Europe method revealed that more than two-thirds of the 19 naturalized and four-fifths of the 17 non-naturalized alien plants presented high or moderate risk, and all 36 alien plants were considered to be rejected for their potential agricultural and environmental risks under the Australian Weed Risk Assessment system. On the characteristics of plant invasions, more attention should be given to disturbed habitats rather than these relative natural or closed ecosystems, and also be prudent and careful of the alien plants that are introduced as useful plants from North or South America and unintentional introduction from Europe. Moreover, annuals needed special attention: three-quarters of the alien plants were annual species, only a few were biennial (8.3%), perennial (11.1%), liana and tree plants (2.8%). Plant invasions are not extremely serious in the AGENC, but there are several alien plants that have naturalized and spread themselves in the region. However, attention should be given in the future to predicting and preventing plant invasions in this fragile region.</p></div

Evaluation on the symmetry of accuracy measures to over-estimates and under-estimates.

<p>A: Synthetic time series data where <i>Y</i>_<i>t</i> is the target series and are forecasts. makes a 10% over-estimate to all observations of <i>Y</i>_<i>t</i>, while makes a 10% under-estimate. B: Results of symmetric evaluation, which shows UMBRAE and all other accuracy measures except sMAPE are symmetric.</p

Evaluation on the scale dependency of accuracy measures.

<p>A: Synthetic time series data where <i>Y</i>_<i>t</i> is the target series and are forecasts. and have the same mean absolute error, but errors are on different percentage scales to the corresponding values of <i>Y</i>_<i>t</i>. B: Results of scale dependency evaluation, where MAE, RMSE, MASE and even GMRAE show no difference between and . MRAE and MAPE produce substantially different errors for the two cases. sMAPE and UMBRAE can reasonably distinguish the two forecasts.</p

Box-and-whisker plot and kernel density estimates for the squared errors used by RMSE.

<p>Box-and-whisker plot and kernel density estimates for the squared errors used by RMSE.</p