Engineering Commons^™

Building Services Engineering January/February

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Development Of A Situational Judgement Test And An Assessment Of Its Efficacy As A Stimulus Of Metacognitive Behaviour In Engineering Students, Darren Carthy

Doctoral

Metacognition entails the conscious evaluation and control of one's cognitive processes. This meta-level control of cognitive process is not essential for all activities, but in the domain of problem solving and the development of new expertise, conscious control of mental functioning is essential to success. Previous studies have shown a relationship between metacognitive knowledge & skills and student self-regulated learning, self-efficacy and more generally, with success in academic and non-academic endeavours; they represent critical skills for an aspiring engineer to possess for their future employability. Metacognition can be stimulated by allowing students to engage and reflect on the problem-solving process. …

From Bench To Worktop: Rapid Evaluation Of Nutritional Parameters In Liquid Foodstuffs By Ir Spectroscopy, David Perezguaita

Articles

We evaluated the use of attenuated total reflectance infrared spectroscopy for simultaneous in situ quantification of the nutritional composition of liquid food stuffs in the industrial kitchen context. Different methodologies were compared, including dry and wet acquisition along with instrument parameters and measurement times of 4 and 60 s. The most effective technique was 1-minute measurement, with prediction errors of 2.6, 0.7, 1.0, 2.2, 0.8, 2.4 g/100 mL and 150 Kcal, for carbohydrates, proteins, fat, sugars, saturated fat, water and energy values, respectively.The 4-second method resulted in larger errors but was more applicable for inline measurements. Dry measurements successfully predicted …

Atmospheric Pressure Dry Etching Of Polysilicon Layers For Highly Reverse Bias-Stable Topcon Solar Cells, Bishal Kafle, Sebastian Mack, Christopher Teßmann, Sattar Bashardoust, Laurent Clochard, Edward Duffy, Andreas Wolf, Marc Hofmann, Jochen Rentsch

Articles

Single-sided etching (SSE) of a-Si/poly-Si is typically considered a challenge for realizing a cost-efficient TOPCon production sequence, as there is a certain degree of unwanted wrap-around for poly-Si deposition technologies such as low pressure chemical vapor deposition, plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, and atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition. To date, alkaline or acidic wet-chemical solutions in either inline or batch configurations are used for this purpose. Herein, an alternative SSE process is proposed using an inline dry etching tool, which applies molecular fluorine as the etching gas under atmospheric pressure conditions. The developed etching process performs complete etching of both as-deposited …

Parents' Experiences Of A Language-Focused Home Visiting Scheme In Ireland, Aisling Ni Dhiorbhain Dr, Maire Mhic Mhathuna, Padraig Ó Duibhir Dr

Articles

This article reports parents’ experiences of the Tús Maith (Good Start) home visiting scheme in South-West Ireland. The goal of Tús Maith is to support parents who wish to speak Irish to their children at home in the Kerry Gaeltacht, an Irish-speaking heartland area. Home visitors spend an hour a week, over a period of six weeks, interacting with children and parents with varying levels of competency in Irish. Home visitors who are native speakers of Irish, offer individualised guidance on how to promote the use of Irish as a home language, while encouraging families to engage in activities …

Thoughts On The Future Of Higher Education In The Uk: A Personal View With A Historical Context, Jonathan Blackledge

Articles

Before the effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic, there had been continued debate about the future of Higher Education (HE) in the UK. It is now accepted that the effect of the pandemic will have a long-lasting effect on HE in the UK and elsewhere. This paper addresses the changes that are currently taking place, based on a strategy that aims to develop a future knowledge-based economy, following the UK governments 2019 landmark review of HE. It explores the underlying parallels between the current situation and certain historical events that catalysed the development of a new approach to HE in the …

Super Twisting Sliding-Mode Control Of Dvr With Frequency-Adaptive Brockett Oscillator, Samet Biricik, Hasan Komurcugil, Hafiz Ahmed, Ebrahim Babaei

Articles

This paper presents a super twisting sliding mode control (ST-SMC) for single-phase dynamic voltage restorers (DVRs). Unlike the conventional first-order sliding mode controller, the proposed ST-SMC technique eliminates the need for differentiating the compensation voltage in the sliding surface function while keeping the merits of first-order SMC. As a consequence of employing ST-SMC, a continuous control signal is achieved from which the pulse width modulation (PWM) signals can be generated. In this case, the inverter operates at constant switching frequency. The stability analysis of ST-SMC is also presented. The reference compensation voltage needed in ST-SMC is estimated by using Brockett …

The Discrete Fourier Transform - A Practical Approach, David Dorran

Articles

These notes on the Discrete Fourier Transform include numerous practical examples that make use of audio signals.

Examination Of Driver Visual And Cognitive Responses To Billboard Elicited Passive Distraction Using Eye-Fixation Related Potential, Yongxiang Wang, William Clifford, Charles Markham, Catherine Deegan

Articles

Distractions external to a vehicle contribute to visual attention diversion that may cause traffic accidents. As a low-cost and efficient advertising solution, billboards are widely installed on side of the road, especially the motorway. However, the effect of billboards on driver distraction, eye gaze, and cognition has not been fully investigated. This study utilises a customised driving simulator and synchronised electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking system to investigate the cognitive processes relating to the processing of driver visual information. A distinction is made between eye gaze fixations relating to stimuli that assist driving and others that may be a source …

Beyond Charge Transfer: The Impact Of Auger Recombination And Fret On Pl Quenching In An Rgo-Qds System, Anton Babaev, Anastasiia Sokolova, Kevin Berwick, Alexander Baranov, Anatoly Fedorov, Aleksandr P. Litvin

Articles

PL intensity quenching and the PL lifetime reduction of fluorophores located close to gra‐ phene derivatives are generally explained by charge and energy transfer processes. Analyzing the PL from PbS QDs in rGO/QD systems, we observed a substantial reduction in average PL lifetimes with an increase in rGO content that cannot be interpreted solely by these two processes. To explain the PL lifetime dependence on the rGO/QD component ratio, we propose a model based on the Auger recombination of excitations involving excess holes left in the QDs after the charge transfer process. To validate the model, we conducted additional experiments …

Using Case Studies In Engineering Ethics Education: The Case For Immersive Scenarios Through Stakeholder Engagement And Real Life Data, Diana Adela Martin, Eddie Conlon, Brian Bowe

Articles

Our contribution is part of a broader study conducted in cooperation with the national accreditation body Engineers Ireland that examined the conceptualisation and education of ethics in engineering programmes in Ireland. The paper is a qualitative examination of the use of case studies in engineering ethics education and includes 23 engineering programmes from 6 higher education institutions in Ireland. The qualitative study aims to determine (RQ1) how cases are selected, (RQ2) the goals envisioned for engineering ethics case instruction, (RQ3) the characteristics of the scenarios employed and (RQ4) the preferred application by instructors. A first finding notes the diverse set …

Day-Ahead Offering Strategy In The Market For Concentrating Solar Power Considering Thermoelectric Decoupling By A Compressed Air Energy Storage, Shitong Sun, S. Mahdi Kazemi-Razi, Lisa G. Kaigutha, Mousa Marzband, Hamed Nafisi, Ameena Saad Al-Sumaiti

Articles

Due to limited fossil fuel resources, a growing increase in energy demand and the need to maintain positive environmental effects, concentrating solar power (CSP) plant as a promising technology has driven the world to find new sustainable and competitive methods for energy production. The scheduling capability of a CSP plant equipped with thermal energy storage (TES) surpasses a photovoltaic (PV) unit and augments the sustainability of energy system performance. However, restricting CSP plant application compared to a PV plant due to its high investment is a challenging issue. This paper presents a model to assemble a combined heat and power …

Underestimation Bias And Underfitting In Machine Learning, Padraig Cunningham, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

. Often, what is termed algorithmic bias in machine learning will be due to historic bias in the training data. But sometimes the bias may be introduced (or at least exacerbated) by the algorithm itself. The ways in which algorithms can actually accentuate bias has not received a lot of attention with researchers focusing directly on methods to eliminate bias - no matter the source. In this paper we report on initial research to understand the factors that contribute to bias in classification algorithms. We believe this is important because underestimation bias is inextricably tied to regularization, i.e. measures to …

Rees/Aaee Special Focus On Ethics: Introduction By Guest Editor, Shannon Chance, Shannon Chance

Articles

Today, more than ever, we see the significance of ethics in developing and sustaining the built, social, and natural environments around us. We also recognise the need to develop engineering students’ knowledge, skills, and values regarding engineering, innovation, design, production, and the like. Engineers’ actions can have intended as well as unintended consequences, and we as a community need to become more aware of the outcomes and implications of our work. In response to the many topics presented at the REES 2019, the REEN Board selected ethics as the focus for this special issue and joined with AAEE to publish …

Here You Have To Be Mixing: Collaborative Learning On An Engineering Program In Ireland As Experienced By A Group Of Young Middle Eastern Women, Shannon Chance, Bill Williams

Articles

This research project uses grounded theory to analyze interviews conducted with eight women from Oman and Kuwait. Members of the sample group were studying together at an institute of technology in Dublin, Ireland. The paper reports patterns in 15 interviews collected in the years 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017 to provide a longitudinal overview of the experience of the learners. During the coding process, three major themes emerged having to do with the experience of learning with others and/or learning in groups. The first theme involved communication within the group and the group's approaches to working together. The second identified …

In Depth Characterisation Of The Biomolecular Coronas Of Polymer Coated Inorganic Nanoparticles With Differential Centrifugal Sedimentation, André Perez-Potti, Hender Lopez, Beatriz Pelaz, Abuelmagd Abdelmonem, Mahmoud G. Soliman, Ingmar Schoen, Philip M. Kelly, Kenneth A. Dawson, Wolfgang J. Parak, Zeljka Krpetic, Marco P. Monopoli

Articles

Advances in nanofabrication methods have enabled the tailoring of new strategies towards the controlled production of nanoparticles with attractive applications in healthcare. In many cases, their characterisation remains a big challenge, particularly for small-sized functional nanoparticles of 5 nm diameter or smaller, where current particle sizing techniques struggle to provide the required sensitivity and accuracy. There is a clear need for the development of new reliable characterisation approaches for the physico-chemical characterisation of nanoparticles with significant accuracy, particularly for the analysis of the particles in the presence of complex biological fluids. Herein, we show that the Differential Centrifugal Sedimentation can …

Biomechanics Of Head Impacts In An Unhelmeted Sport, Stephen Tiernan

Doctoral

Concussion in sport is very common and often the injury is undetectable using CT and MRI scans. In addition, approximately 50% of concussions areunreported.The project initially investigated the suitability of a skin patch sensor and a head-band sensorfor the measurement of head impacts in unhelmeted sports. It was found that both were unsuitable due to large angular accelerationerrors. Thestudy then collaborated withCAMLab at Stanford University and 25 Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) athletes were fitted CAMLab’s validated instrumented mouthguard. 451 video confirmed impacts were recorded at 19 sparring and 11 competitive MMA events. Five concussions were diagnosed during the competitive events. …

Optical Fiber Sensors For In-Situ Detection Of Solid-Liquid Phase Change For N-Octadecane, Wei Han

Doctoral

In the past few decades solid-liquid phase change materials (PCMs) have gained an increasingly important role in thermal energy storage applications due to their ability to absorb or release large amounts of energy during melting or solidification. The precise phase change temperature varies with different conditions, such as external pressure, small variations in the PCM composition in the case of multi-component mixtures and/or material purity. In order to achieve better energy efficiency for the energy storage process, it is necessary to be able to accurately detect the solid-liquid phase changes in the bulk of a PCM.

Optical fiber sensors allow …

Inter-Microgrid Operation: Power Sharing, Frequency Restoration, Seamless Reconnection And Stability Analysis, Sandipan Patra

Doctoral

Electrification in the rural areas sometimes become very challenging due to area accessibility and economic concern. Standalone Microgrids (MGs) play a very crucial role in these kinds of a rural area where a large power grid is not available. The intermittent nature of distributed energy sources and the load uncertainties can create a power mismatch and can lead to frequency and voltage drop in rural isolated community MG. In order to avoid this, various intelligent load shedding techniques, installation of micro storage systems and coupling of neighbouring MGs can be adopted. Among these, the coupling of neighbouring MGs is the …

An Empirical Analysis To Control Product Counterfeiting In The Automotive Industry's Supply Chains In Pakistan, Saad Akhter Jaffery

Doctoral

The counterfeits pose significant health and safety threat to consumers. The quality image of firms is vulnerable to the damage caused by the expanding flow of counterfeit products in today’s global supply chains. The counterfeiting markets are swelling due to globalization and customers’ willingness to buy counterfeits, fueling illicit activities to explode further. Buyers look for the original parts are deceived by the false (deceptive) signals’ communication. The counterfeiting market has become a multi-billion industry but lacks detailed insights into the supply side of counterfeiting (deceptive side). The study aims to investigate and assess the relationship between the anti-counterfeiting strategies …

Near-Field Propagation Analysis For Vivaldi Antenna Design: Insight Into The Propagation Process For Optimizing The Directivity, Integrity Of Signal Transmission, And Efficiency, Ha Hoang, Matthias John, Patrick Mcevoy, Max Ammann

Articles

Refined optimization of complex curve–linear-shaped radiators, such as traveling-wave Vivaldi antennas, can be achieved by considering simulated near fields to interpret in detail the structural influences of a design. The relationships between the space and time distributions of electromagnetic (EM) energy clusters and the geometric features are revealed with appropriate use of impulse response analysis combined with the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. This article reports a deeper approach when applied to the adjustment of the geometric features of a traveling-wave antenna based on an analysis of near-field propagation features.

State Of The Art In Composition, Fabrication, Characterization, And Modeling Methods Of Cement-Based Thermoelectric Materials For Low-Temperature Applications, Xiaoli Liu, Ruchita Jani, Esther Orisakwee, Conrad Johnston, Piotr Chudzinski, Ming Qu, Brian Norton, Niall Holmes Dr., Jorge Kohanoff, Lorenzo Stella, Hongxi Yin, Kazuaki Yazawa

Articles

The worldwide energy crisis and environmental deterioration are probably humanity’s greatest challenges. Thermoelectricity, which allows for the mutual conversion between thermal and electrical energy, has become a promising technology to alleviate this challenge. Increasingly more research focuses on how to fabricate and apply thermoelectric materials for harvesting energy and regulating the indoor thermal environment. However, only a few studies have focused on cementitious materials with thermoelectric potential. Thermoelectric cement is a composite material in which particular additives can enhance the thermoelectric performance of ordinary cement. By potentially replacing traditional construction materials with thermoelectric cement in building applications, electricity could be …

Bio-Binder—Innovative Asphalt Technology, Amir Tabakovic

Articles

The global road network spans 16.3 million km [1], of which 5 million km is in the EU. These road networks fulfil major economic and social goals by facilitating the movement of goods and people throughout the EU, and are therefore of the utmost importance to the economic and social life of the EU [2]. National governments invest heavily in their road networks, e.g., in 2014, EUR 53.33 billion was invested in the development and maintenance of the EU road network [3]. Each year, the world produces 1.6 trillion tonnes of asphalt [4], of which 218 million tonnes is produced …

Do Greenhouse Gases Impact Our Respiratory System? A Study Of The Effect Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions On Respiratory Disease Related Mortality In Ireland, Anushree Priyadarshini, Christina Kenny

Articles

Respiratory-related deaths are one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality every year in the developed world. Previous research outlines that greenhouse gas emission levels have a negative effect on respiratory health and can cause worsening of symptoms. This study examines the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on respiratory disease related mortality in Ireland from 2007-2017 using Statbank data from Central Statistics Office, Ireland. Analysis shows that over the last decade, while greenhouse gases emissions in Ireland have reduced by 1.1%, respiratory disease related mortality has increased on an average by 2.1%. Results indicate that greenhouse gas emis- sions …

Combining Bert With Contextual Linguistic Features For Identification Of Propaganda Spans In News Articles, Arjumand Younus, Muhammad Atif Qureshi

Conference papers

Recent endeavours at detection of propaganda in news articles treat this as a fine-grained problem of detecting it within fragments; and hence, transformer based embeddings perform decently in such detection. We build our propaganda detection framework on top of a transformer model simultaneously enriching it with contextual linguistic information of surrounding part-of-speech tags and LIWC categories the word itself belongs to. The evaluation outcomes being encouraging indicate a huge potential for this line of reasoning in natural language processing of news text.

Power-Weighted Lpc Formant Estimation, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

A power-weighted formant frequency estimation procedure based on Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) is presented. It works by pre-emphasizing the dominant spectral components of an input signal, which allows a subsequent estimation step to extract formant frequencies with greater accuracy. The accuracy of traditional LPC formant estimation is improved by this new power-weighted formant estimator for different classes of synthetic signals and for speech. Power-weighted LPC significantly and reliably outperforms LPC and variants of LPC at the task of formant estimation using the VTR formants dataset, a database consisting of the Vocal Tract Resonance (VTR) frequency trajectories obtained by human experts …

Predicting Quality Of Delivery Metrics For Adaptive Video Codec Sessions, Obinna Izima, Ruairí De Fréin, Mark Davis

Conference papers

Predicting video quality will continue to be an active area of research given the dominance of video traffic for years to come. Network service practitioners that are poised to handle the strain on the existing limited bandwidth constraints are better placed to be SLA-compliant. The dynamic and time-varying nature of cloud-hosted services require improved techniques to realize accurate models of the systems. To address this challenge: (1) we propose Codec-aware Network Adaptation Agent (cNAA), an online light-weight data learning engine that achieves accurate and correct predictions of quality of delivery (QoD) metrics, namely jitter for video services. cNAA achieves this …

Enhancing The Visibility Of Vernier Effect In A Tri-Microfiber Coupler Fiber Loop Interferometer For Ultrasensitive Refractive Index And Temperature Sensing, Fangfang Wei, Dejun Liu, Zhe Wang, Zhuochen Wang, Gerald Farrell, Qiang Wu, Gang-Ding Peng, Yuliya Semenova

Articles

In this paper a Vernier effect based sensor is analyzed and demonstrated experimentally in a tri-microfiber coupler (Tri-MFC) and polarization-maintaining fiber (PMF) loop interferometer (Tri-MFC-PMF) to provide ultrasensitive refractive index and temperature sensing. The main novelty of this work is an analysis of parameters of the proposed Tri-MFC-PMF with the objective of determining the conditions leading to a strong Vernier effect. It has been identified by simulation that the Vernier effect is a primary factor in the design of Tri-MFC-PMF loop sensing structure for sensitivity enhancement. It is furthermore demonstrated experimentally that enhancing the visibility of the Vernier spectrum in …

Bs News November/December

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Geospatial-Based Environmental Modelling For Coastal Dune Zone Management, Chen Suo

Doctoral

Tomaintain biodiversity and ecological functionof coastal dune areas, itis important that practical and effective environmentalmanagemental strategies are developed. Advances in geospatial technologies offer a potentially very useful source of data for studies in this environment. This research project aimto developgeospatialdata-basedenvironmentalmodellingforcoastaldunecomplexestocontributetoeffectiveconservationstrategieswithparticularreferencetotheBuckroneydunecomplexinCo.Wicklow,Ireland.Theprojectconducteda general comparison ofdifferent geospatial data collection methodsfor topographic modelling of the Buckroney dune complex. These data collection methodsincludedsmall-scale survey data from aerial photogrammetry, optical satellite imagery, radar and LiDAR data, and ground-based, large-scale survey data from Total Station(TS), Real Time Kinematic (RTK) Global Positioning System(GPS), terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) and Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS).The results identifiedthe advantages and disadvantages of …