The social realm of sustainability is getting the less attention compared with the economic and environmental realms. This less concern about the social sustainability has been experienced also locally in UAE, where buildings are leaning towards adapting economically and environmentally sustainable approaches. The social variable in students' hostel as a type of buildings and micro community at the same time, is very essential. This research aims at investigating the social sustainability design aspects in students' hostels in UAE. To achieve this aim, a conceptual frame work of socially sustainable students' hostel design will be developed in order to investigate the case study of female students' hostels at UAE University. It is hoped that the findings of this research is going to help renovating the exiting hostels to be more socially sustainable and to design new students' hostels in a more socially sustainable manner.
The objective of this study was to crossvalidate and analyze the consistency of four global precipitation products from the GPCC, TRMM, WM, and CMORPH datasets over the UAE using a dense network of 53 rain gauges from 2000 to 2010. The spatial analysis of their consistency versus topography and land cover is expected to reveal the factors affecting the country's rainfall regime. The study also identifies and calibrates the best statistically performing precipitation product as an essential climatic input for monitoring, forecasting, and modeling hydrologic applications over the UAE. Statistical analyses indicate that the TMPA V7 precipitation products record the highest overall agreement with the observational network. Within the UAE, areas that receive high rainfall and fall within the vegetated highlands (e.g., >250 m), provide the most promise for incorporating satellite precipitation into hydrologic monitoring, modeling, or water resource management.
Cities like Abu Dhabi which have not grown gradually are referred to as sudden cities because they emerged instantly and keep rapidly urbanizing. Although this rapid planned development has granted Abu Dhabi the strong admiration of other countries, it has been sometimes hasty and offbalance, overlooking crucial environmental aspects. Within this context, and given urban planning's key role in achieving sustainability goals, it is rather important to operationalize theory and to perform quantitative and multicriteria assessments, in order to provide clear direction to future growth. this paper focuses on a comparison between two superblocks that were developed at different times in Abu Dhabi: one older one on the island itself, and a recent development in the mainland. Both share a similar land use structure and have very similar size and street layout, although their overall density and functionality differs significantly.
Interpenetrating phase composites (IPC) are novel types of 3D composites where the phases are cocontinuous and interconnected in the 3D space. This study focuses on creating, 3D printing, and mechanically testing IPC structure where the hard phase takes the form of periodic cellular lattice/strutbased 3D architectures. The examined IPC cellular structure considered in this study is Reinforced Body Centered Cube (RBCC), which is a strutor skeletalbased periodic structure and was 3D printed using polyjet technology for different volume fractions of the reinforced phase (10~40%). Afterward, compressive mechanical properties were obtained for such cellularIPC. The results revealed that RBCCIPC showed an outstanding performance in terms of mechanical properties at higher volume fractions (35~40%) of the hard phase.
Development of underwater infrastructure is constrained by many factors such as cost and project time. These limitations are linked to the occupational hazards faced by professional divers. This paper tries to eliminate these risks by using a bioinspired robot to electrically ignite nanoheater foils which will create welds. Commercially available Ni/Al reactive multilayers are used to join components. The nanoheaters release large amounts of heat when an exothermic reaction is initiated by an electrical stimulus. The strength of welds generated by nanofoils is increased introducing holes on the nanoheaters. In conclusion, the use of Ni/Al reactive multilayers with soft robots will contribute in the automation of underwater manufacturing and hence eliminate the occupational risks accompanied by the current technology.
The locations of the strain nodes on the extended octagonal ring (EOR) force transducer have been examined by previous works. However, there is a lack of agreement between the two most famous methods, the analytical and the numerical. Moreover, there is a lack of agreement between the different papers using numerical method. This work is done to locate the strain nodes and consequently strain gages locations, study symmetry assumption done previously, and examine the effect of the direction of vertical load application on the EOR. Experimental work to validate numerical solutions is still in progress.
Membrane distillation (MD) is appropriate technology for desalination, wastewater treatment, and medicinal application. Direct contact (DCMD) is the most common membrane distillation configuration due to its simplicity, high flux, and low energy demand. In this work, a high fidelity validated numerical analysis using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling is carried out to assess the performance of the DCMD. The model is validated by an experimental setup. In particular, the different flow velocity is considered. The results are demonstrated in terms of temperature profiles, temperature polarization coefficient (TPC), mass flux and thermal efficiency. At 75 ?C operating feed temperature running at relatively high velocity (Re=100), 43% average thermal efficiency can be achieved.
Although biadhesive systems have been studied for automotive and aerospace structures, its suitability for bonded anchors have not yet been explored. Therefore, in this study, mechanics of stress transfer from the anchor to biadhesive bondline through shear is studied via a theoretical framework. For validation, the distribution of shear stress along the bondline is compared with that of equivalent axisymmetric Finite Element (FE) models and the results are found to be in good agreement. The influence of boundary condition at the embeddedend of the anchor in the biadhesive bondline is studied for various bondlength ratios. Closed form expressions for shear stress distribution are presented for anchors with homogeneous bondlines. A reduction in shear stress concentration of about 40 ?n be achieved by the use of biadhesive bonded anchors. The theoretical solution developed can be readily used to evaluate the pullout performance of postinstalled adhesive anchors.
It is very crucial to keep the power system operate stably using reactive power regulation. Traditional reactive power compensators have some disadvantages so that they cannot be widely used in some applications. The magnetic energy recovery switch (MERS) has been proposed as a new kind of Static Var Compensator (SVC). SVCMERS has some advantages in line frequency switching, small dccapacitor and robustness. This paper proposes an algorithm which can compensate reactive power according to different reactive power requirement, and even for variable load, it can compensate the reactive power dynamically. At first, the fundamental control principle of MERS is discussed. The control diagram is proposed detailed and the whole system is simulated in PSIM. Final simulation results verified that the proposed device have a good performance for compensating the reactive power.
In this paper, an accurate location estimation of partial discharge (PD) in an oil insulation system is discussed. The study aims at identifying disturbance and uncertainties in partial discharge localization system. Initially, an extended Kalman filter is used to estimate the PD location. The optimal filter is obtained by identifying noise statistics using maximum likelihood estimation. The accuracy of the proposed algorithm is verified by comparing the estimated PD location using assumed noise covariances and the estimated PD location using estimated noise covariances.
