envi
225372182
Research on Annual Thermal Environment of Non Hvac Building Regulated by Window to Wall Ratio in a Chinese City (Chenzhou)
As the window to wall ratio, a microclimatic factor in residential districts, regulates the indoor thermal environment and implicates the energy consumption, this research was aimed at interpreting the microclimate effects of the window to wall ratio on the indoor thermal environment of the non Hvac building located in the block from the view of a full year. Urban built parameters and building material parameters applied in Chenzhou were investigated, with the ENVI met model serving as the analytical tool calculating the meteorological data recorded in the local national meteorological station. The thermal perception criterion of Chenzhou citizens was investigated, and thermal isotherms were employed to interpret the thermal perception distribution throughout the year. Analytical results revealed that the annual indoor thermal environment would deteriorate along with the growth of the window to wall ratio in Chenzhou, with the very hot thermal perception environment covering the months from March to October once the window to wall ratio outnumbered 60.00% Furthermore, the hot and very hot thermal perception environments originated in the ranges of 0.00% to 20.00% and that of 20.00% to 40.00% respectively. Furthermore, if the window to wall ratios (WWRs) outnumbered 40% their effects on the indoor thermal perception environment would gradually decrease and be powerless once that exceeded 80%
Jiayu Li Bohong Zheng Xiao Dong Chen Yihua Zhou Jifa Rao Komi Bernard Bedra
216397232
From the Bottom Up: Assessing the Spectral Ability of Common Multispectral Sensors to Detect Surface Archaeological Deposits Using Field Spectrometry and Advanced Classifiers in the Shashi Limpopo Confluence Area
This paper investigates the ability of six common multispectral sensors (GeoEye, Landsat 8 OLI, RapidEye, Sentinel 2, SPOT 5, and WorldView 2) to map archaeological sites typically inhabited by the farming communities of Southern Africa and characterized by surface features such as middens, non vitrified dung, and vitrified dung. To achieve this, hyperspectral data collected in the field using a GER 1500 field spectroradiometer were resampled to the spectral resolutions of the selected sensors using the spectral library resampling tool in ENVI. Mean decrease in accuracy was used to assess the importance of both hyperspectral wavelengths and each band allocated to a multispectral sensor in discriminating the selected archaeological classes. Two predictive models based on the resampled hyperspectral data were developed in R using algorithms for support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) classifiers. The results demonstrate that data resampled to the resolution of common multispectral sensors have the ability to predict surface archaeological features using RF and SVM classifiers. Important bands for predicting sites are mostly in the visible and shortwave infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The best performance was achieved with data resampled to the resolution of the Sentinel 2 sensor, which attained 81.90% and 92.38% accuracy in both RF and SVM classifiers respectively. The predictions indicate the relevance of field spectroscopy studies to better understand the spectral models critical for archaeological sites detection. Cet article etudie la capacite de six courants capteurs multispectraux (GeoEye, Landsat 8 OLI, RapidEye, Sentinel 2, SPOT 5 et WorldView 2) les plus appropries pour la cartographie des sites archeologiques habites par les communautes agricoles de l'Afrique australe. Ces sites ont des caracteristiques de surface specifiques, telles que des amas, de bouse non vitrifiee et de bouse vitrifiee. Pour y parvenir, des donnees hyperspectrales ont ete recueillies sur le terrain a l'aide d'un spectroradiometre de champ GER 1500. Les donnees ont ensuite ete reechantillonnees aux resolutions spectrales de les capteurs selectionnes. Cela s'est fait a l'aide de l'outil de reechantillonnage des bibliotheques spectrales integre dans l'ENVI. La diminution moyenne de la precision a ete utilisee pour evaluer l'importance des longueurs d'onde hyperspectrales et de chaque bande attribuee a un capteur multispectral, afin de distinguer les classes archeologiques susmentionnees. Deux modeles predictifs bases sur les donnees hyperspectrales reechantillonnees ont ete developpes dans le R, en utilisant des algorithmes classificateurs support vector machine (SVM) et random forest (RF) Les resultats ont montre que les donnees reechantillonnees a la resolution des capteurs multispectraux courants permettent de predire les caracteristiques archeologiques de surface a l'aide de classificateurs RF et SVM. Les bandes importantes pour la prediction des sites etaient principalement dans les regions de l'infrarouge visible et a ondes courtes du spectre electromagnetique. Les meilleures performances ont ete obtenues avec des donnees reechantillonnees a la resolution du capteur Sentinel 2, qui ont atteint une precision de 81,90% et 92,38% dans les classificateurs RF et SVM. Les predictions indiquent la pertinence des etudes de spectroscopie de terrain pour la comprehension des modeles spectraux les plus importants pour la detection des sites archeologiques.
Olaotse Lokwalo Thabeng Stefania Merlo Elhadi Adam
211213792
Lead chlorides in paint on a Della Robbia terracotta sculpture.
Materials in the paint layers of an early sixteenth century painted and glazed terracotta sculpture by Giovanni della Robbia, Pieta were identified. The presence of the rare lead chloride salts, cotunnite (PbCl2) and challacolloite (KPb2Cl5) were confirmed using Raman spectroscopy and electron back scatter diffraction. Well formed habit of large crystals of challacolloite indicates slow growth from solution. The stability and potential pathways for the in situ formation of lead chloride compounds are discussed. The presence of lead chloride phases in the Pieta indicates conditions of high chloride ion concentrations (i.e. activities) and/or low pH led to the alteration of the pigment lead white (hydrocerussite, 2PbCO3*Pb(OH)2) This work highlights the role of ion transport in alteration of artists' materials and emphasizes the importance of considering the role of treatments and envi ronmental factors in changes in materials, and reinforces our awareness of the on going chemistry occurring in works of art.
Analytical chemistry
Xiao Ma Barbara Berrie
221981138
Quantifying Land Use Land Cover Changes in the Lake Victoria Basin Using Satellite Remote Sensing: The Trends and Drivers between 1985 and 2014
The Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) is a significant resource for five states within East Africa, which faces major land use land cover changes that threaten ecosystem integrity and ecosystem services derived from the basin's resources. To assess land use land cover changes between 1985 and 2014, and subsequently determine the trends and drivers of these changes, we used a series of Landsat images and field data obtained from the LVB. Landsat image pre processing and band combinations were done in ENVI 5.1. A supervised classification was applied on 118 Landsat scenes using the maximum likelihood classifier in ENVI 5.1. The overall accuracy of classified images was computed for the 2014 images using 124 reference data points collected through stratified random sampling. Computations of area under various land cover classes were calculated between the 1985 and 2014 images. We also correlated the area from natural vegetation classes to farmlands and settlements (urban areas) to explore relationships between land use land cover conversions among these classes. Based on our land cover classifications, we obtained overall accuracy of 71% and a moderate Kappa statistic of 0.56. Our results indicate that the LVB has undergone drastic changes in land use land cover, mainly driven by human activities that led to the conversion of forests, woodlands, grasslands, and wetlands to either farmlands or settlements. We conclude that information from this work is useful not only for basin scale assessments and monitoring of land cover changes but also for targeting, prioritizing, and monitoring of small scale, community led efforts to restore degraded and fragmented areas in the basin. Such efforts could mitigate the loss of ecosystem services previously derived from large contiguous land covers which are no longer tenable to restore. We recommend adoption of a basin scale, operational, Earth observation based, land use change monitoring framework. Such a framework can facilitate rapid and frequent assessments of gains and losses in specific land cover classes and thus focus strategic interventions in areas experiencing major losses, through mitigation and compensatory approaches.
Remote. Sens.
Robinson Mugo Rose Waswa James Nyaga Antony Ndubi Emily Adams Africa Ixmucane Flores-Anderson
218982722
The influence of surface compositions on the reactivity of pyrite toward aqueous U(VI)
Pyrite plays a significant role in governing the mobility of toxic uranium in anaerobic envi ronment via an oxidation reduction process occurring at the mineral water interface, but the factors influencing the reaction kinetics remain poorly understood. In this study, natural pyri tes with different impurities (Pb, As and Si) and different surface pretreatments were used to react with aqueous U(VI) from pH ~3.0 to ~9.5. Both aqueous and solid results indicated that freshly crushed pyrites, which do have more surface Fe2+/Fe3+ and S2 sites that were generat ed from breakage of Fe(S) S bonds during ball milling, exhibited a much stronger reactivity than those treated with acid washing. Besides, U(VI) reduction which involves the possible intermediate U(V) and the formation of hyperstoichiometric UO2+x(s) was found to preferen tially occur at Pb and As rich spots on the pyrite surface, suggesting that the incorporated impurities could act as reactive sites due to the generation of lattice defects and galena and arsenopyrite like local configurations. These reactive surface sites can be removed by acid washing, leaving a pyrite surface nearly inert towards aqueous U(VI) Thus, reactivity of py rite towards U(VI) is largely governed by its surface compositions, which provides an insight on the chemical behavior of both pyrite and uranium in various environments.
Environmental science technology
Bin Ma Alejandro Fernandez-Martinez Mingliang Kang Kaifeng Wang Aled R Lewis Thierry Gg Maffeis Nathaniel Findling E Salas-Colera Delphine Tisserand Sarah Bureau Laurent Charlet
228989143
Economic, environment, and social impacts of two routes of methanol production via sustainability evaluator
Abstract Methanol is a clean energy resource as it can be produced from the waste, natural gas, landfill gas, and many more. Nowadays, methanol is one of the primary feedstocks for many chemical productions. Therefore, the production of methanol is now getting demanded around the world. However, one must consider the sustainability of methanol production. Sustainability contemplates three significant impacts of the process that are economic (EI) environment (ENVI) and social (SCI) Hence, this paper aims to evaluate the sustainability of methanol processing plants using Sustainability Evaluator (SE) in conjunction with Aspen HYSYS. Two routes were chosen to simulate the methanol plants (i) via Syngas (ii) and natural gas. NRTL and Peng Robinson were used as thermodynamic packages to ensure a good description of a nonideal system. The results generated from HYSYS, such as purity, production yield, and the amount of energy consumed, were extracted to be fed into the SE. Methanol via natural gas has a higher purity, which was 99.2% compared to methanol via Syngas that was only 94.1% The SUI of the methanol production via syngas and methanol production via natural gas were found to be 0.34 and 0.15, respectively. Therefore, the overall sustainability index has shown that the methanol plant via natural gas that simulated in this project via HYSYS was more sustainable.
Afnan Syihabuddin Mohamad Norfazilah Abdul Halim H Hashim Aliff Radzuan Mohamad Radzi
218933497
The Microclimate Design Process in Current African Development: The UEM Campus in Maputo, Mozambique
Even if current action towards sustainability in architecture mainly concerns single buildings, the responsibility of the urban shape on local microclimate has largely been ascertained. In fact, it heavily affects the energy performances of the buildings and their environmental behaviour. This produces the necessity to broaden the field of intervention toward the urban scale, involving in the process different disciplines, from architecture to fluid dynamics and physics. Following these ideas, the Masterplan for the Campus of the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo (Mozambique) develops a methodology that integrates microclimatic data and analyses from the initial design model. The already validated software ENVI met (Version 4.4, ENVI_MET GmbH, Essen, Germany) acts as a useful 'feedback' tool that is able to assess the microclimatic behaviour of the design concept, also in terms of outdoor comfort. In particular, the analysis focused on the microclimatic performances of a 'C' block typology east oriented in relation to the existing buildings, in Maputo's specific climatic characteristics. The initial urban proposal was gradually evaluated and modified in relation to the main critical aspects highlighted by the microclimatic analyses, in a sort of circular process that ended with a proposed solution ensuring better outdoor comfort than the existing buildings, and which provided an acceptable balance between spatial and climatic instances.
Giovanni Marco Chiri Maddalena Achenza Anselmo Cani Leonardo Neves Luca Tendas Simone Ferrari
225699964
Study of Urban Greenery Models to Prevent Overheating of Parked Vehicles in P R Facilities in Ljubljana, Slovenia
Parking in park and ride (P R) facilities on the outskirts of a city reduces the traffic inside the cities and follows the principles of sustainable mobility. However, large paved (asphalt) surfaces create urban heat islands (UHI) This causes the temperature to rise in vehicles during full day parking, which has a negative effect on comfort level and driving performance. This study was conceptualized as two stage research. The first (preliminary) stage dealt with the measurement and analysis of temperature data at two nearby open parking lots in the city of Ljubljana, one of which was the main research spatial area, P R Barje (L1) and Trnovo parking (L2) which was used for comparison in the first stage research. In the preliminary research, we underlined the problem of long term parking in parking areas exposed to heatwaves (HW) The second stage involved the studying of greening schemes in P R facilities, which would allow for optimal shading during parking. Advanced 3D and 4D models using ENVI met and LEONARDO software were developed, which assessed the parking surfaces and the areas of optimum outdoor comfort. Shading by greenery was adopted in this paper, as the strategy aimed at improving the conditions by modelling different variants of greening the parking lot L1.
Alenka Fikfak Kristijan Lavtizar Janez Peter Grom Saja Kosanovic Martina Zbasnik-Senegacnik
219481378
Investigating the Reliability of Irrigated Area Coverages from Fragmented Lands: The case of Tigray, Northern Ethiopia.
Consistent and well timed information regarding the extent of irrigated areas is very important for the development of the agricultural sector. This study investigated the reliability of traditional estimates of irrigated area coverages from three micro dam irrigation schemes. High resolution Google Earth (GE) and medium resolution satellite imagery coupled with an intensive ground survey were employed to determine irrigation area coverages. Landsat 8 image pre processing and classification was carried out in ENVI 5.0 software. In comparison to the Landsat 8 based estimates, the traditional method over estimated 87% of the total 14 cases considered. The level of discrepancies in scheme area coverages range from a minimum of 20% (underestimated) to a maximum of 224% Besides this, the traditional estimates were ranging from 1.8 to 238% of GE based estimates. Whereas, the Landsat 8 based estimates slightly overestimated it by 1.8% 16% of GE based estimates. On the other hand, the traditional estimates tend to underestimate/ignore crops with smaller area coverages and overestimate crops with relatively larger area coverages. The results hinted that the using medium and low resolution satellite imagery could improve the data collection and reporting from irrigated agriculture in developing countries.
Filmon Tquabo Gebremariam Solomon Habtu Yemane Adane Tesfa-alem Gebreegziabher Negasi Solomon Eyasu Yazew
209562240
Single marker and haplotype based association analysis of anthracnose Colletotrichum dematium) resistance in spinach Spinacia oleracea
Spinach anthracnose (Colletotrichum dematium) is an economically important disease widespread across spinach (Spinacia oleracea) growing regions of the USA and around the world (Correll, Black, Koike, Brandenberger, Dalnello, 1994) Several anthracnose causing Colletotrichum species have demonstrated considerable versatility in plant host preference and virulence in different envi ronments. For example, the anthracnose pathogen species C. fruticola and C. siamense can both infect white jute, a fibre crop in China (Niu, Gao, Chen, Qi, 2016; Sharma, Kumar, Weir, Hyde, Shenoy, 2013) C. brevisporum, C. gloeosporiodes and C. truncatum cause pep per anthracnose disease in India and China (Liu, Tang, et al. 2016a) Colletotrichum siamense has been found on partridge tea, citrus and mango in China, India, South Africa and Brazil (Cheng et al. 2013; Liu et al. 2017; Liu, Chen, Liu, Hou, 2018) Similarly, C. dematium has been isolated from a range of crops including common knot grass in China, cowpea in South Africa, tomato fruits and mulberry in Argentina, the ornamental plant German Statice in Bulgaria, and Received: 13 August 2019 Accepted: 24 September 2019 DOI: 10.1111/pbr.12773
Plant Breeding
Henry O Awika Kimberly Cochran Vijay Joshi Renesh Bedre Kranthi K Mandadi Carlos A Avila