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The design and assessment of net-zero buildings commonly focus exclusively on the operational phase, ignoring the embodied environmental impacts over the building life cycle. An analysis is presented on the consequences of integrating embodied impacts into the assessment of the environmental advantageousness of net-zero concepts. Fundamental issues needing consideration in the design process - based on the evaluation of primary energy use and related greenhouse gas emissions - are examined by comparing three net-zero building design and assessment cases: (1) no embodied impacts included, net balance limited to the operation stage only; (2) embodied impacts included but evaluated separately from the operation stage; and (3) embodied impacts included with the operation stage in a life cycle approach. A review of recent developments in research, standardization activities and design practice and the presentation of a case study of a residential building in Norway highlight the critical importance of performance indicator definitions and system boundaries. A practical checklist is presented to guide the process of incorporating embodied impacts across the building life cycle phases in net-zero design. Its implications are considered on overall environmental impact assessment of buildings. Research and development challenges, as well as recommendations for designers and other stakeholders, are identified.

In this article we present various issues that need careful design for the successful implementation of OFDMA-based multihop cellular networks which need incorporation of relay terminals. The first issue we present is synchronization. We show that it is not a problematic issue for infrastructure-based relaying, where the relay is deployed by a system operator at strategic points in the cell. Second, we focus on the advantage of adaptive relaying and provide a frame structure to enable adaptive relaying in a cellular network operating according to the IEEE 802.16e standard. The third issue we present is related to hardware implementation aspects. Hardware performance and resource usage analysis will show that cooperative diversity schemes increase hardware resource usage and power/energy consumption at mobile terminals. The last issue we present is within the context of link layer ARQ, where we propose a novel retransmission method, named local retransmission-ARQ (LR-ARQ), which is designed to take advantage of the multihop nature of the cellular network. Practically, we show that LR-ARQ improves performance with respect to its single-hop counterpart in terms of cell latency, goodput, and throughput.

This paper proposes a distributed finite-time secondary controller to achieve average voltage regulation and proportionate current sharing within a finite settling time for autonomous network of dc microgrids. It is employed by using a distributed finite-time control approach which maintains average voltage regulation of the system facilitating proportionate current sharing simultaneously by virtue of dynamic consensus between its neighbors. The proposed scheme ensures an improved performance over the conventional distributed secondary methods by reducing overshoots and chattering which is significant for critical operation of the loads. The proposed control strategy is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink environment to test link-failure resiliency, plug and play capability, and controller performance under communication delays within a tolerable upper bound on delay determined using time-delay analysis. Moreover the effect of variable time delays in different transmission medium is also simulated to test the practicality of the approach. This strategy is further tested on a 500-W FPGA-based experimental prototype to validate the control approach under different scenarios.

Production of biomass and phycocyanin (PC) were investigated in highly pigmented variants of the unicellular rhodophyte Galdieria sulphuraria, which maintained high specific pigment concentrations when grown heterotrophically in darkness. The parental culture, G. sulphuraria 074G was grown on solidified growth media, and intensely coloured colonies were isolated and grown in high-cell-density fed-batch and continuous-flow cultures. These cultures contained 80-110 g L(-1) biomass and 1.4-2.9 g L(-1) PC. The volumetric PC production rates were 0.5-0.9 g L(-1) day(-1). The PC production rates were 11-21 times higher than previously reported for heterotrophic G. sulphuraria 074G grown on glucose and 20-287 times higher than found in phototrophic cultures of Spirulina platensis, the organism presently used for commercial production of PC.

Chaotic switching is a newly evolve randomization method which suppress the conducted electromagnetic interference generated within the DC-DC converter. It can also suppress the spectral peaks present in the frequency band effectively by spread spectrum technique and spread it over the wide range of frequency band implying electromagnetic interference (EMI) suppression. In this article, a chaotic pulse width modulation technique based on randomized carrier frequency modulation with fixed duty ratio is generated through field programable gate array for suppressing the conducted electromagnetic interference generated within the Luo-converter. A hardware prototype of Luo-converter is developed in order to analyze EMI reduction through power spectral density analysis by comparing both traditional periodic PWM switching and chaotic PWM switching. The results obtained from the hardware setup shows significant reduction of EMI with chaotic switching as compared to traditional pulse width modulation switching under both boost and buck operation of Luo-converter.

There are well-defined methods to measure the (increased) series resistance of PV panels in controlled laboratory conditions. However, the presence of various irradiance levels and partial shadows, in case of an outdoor installation, may affect the series resistance estimation. This paper focuses on the estimation of increased series resistance in outdoor conditions in various irradiance levels and partial shadow conditions. A diagnostic method that is able to detect an increase in series resistance based on fuzzy classifiers is presented and experimentally validated.

In most parts of the world, strikingly small amounts of turnover in the building and construction industry (BCI) are used for R&D as compared to other industries. Despite the apparent difficulties with introducing new technologies in the construction sector, there are success stories as well. One of these concerns the introduction of solar energy systems in the Sydney Olympic Village, which represents a remarkable case of network knowledge renewal, involving competence development among a range of actors in the industry. We follow this case and identify a set of key success factors. Selection of technologies with proven track records, careful network configuration and management and a strong emphasis on knowledge dissemination are important factors for mobilising resources and convincing actors to adopt new recipes for construction.

This study investigated methane yield via anaerobic digestion of multi-component substrates based on mixtures of biodegradable single-component substrates with cow dung as main component. Bench and full-scale digestion experiments were carried out for both single and multi-component substrates to identify the relationship between methane yield and substrate composition. Results from both bench- and full-scale experiments corresponded well and showed that using multi-component substrates increases the methane yield much more than what would be expected from digestion of single substrates. Process stability as indicated by gas production, pH and NH(4)(+) concentration variations were also improved by using multi-component substrates compared to digestion of single-component substrates. The results, thus, suggest that assessment of methane yield for multi-component substrates cannot reliably be based on methane yields for corresponding single-component substrates but should instead be measured directly.