Search results for " Monitoring"
showing 10 items of 3129 documents
Modelling relationship among energy demand, climate and office building features: A cluster analysis at European level
2016
Abstract More than one-third of the energy demand of industrialised countries is due to achieving acceptable conditions of thermal comfort and lighting in buildings. Energy demand in buildings depends on a combination of several parameters, such as climate, envelope typologies, occupant behaviour, and intended use. Indeed, assessing a building’s energy performance requires substantial input data describing constructions, environmental conditions, envelope thermo-physical properties, geometry, control strategies, and several other parameters. This has been a very active area of research in recent years, and several numerical approaches have been developed for building simulation; furthermore…
Productivity of wastewater treatment plants in the Valencia Region of Spain
2017
Abstract This study analyses the evolution of productivity over the 2008–2012 period for a homogenous set of 199 wastewater treatment plants that are located in the Valencia Region of Spain and utilize the same treatment technology, using the smoothed bootstrap Malmquist productivity index based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The results reveal a negative trend in productivity that is mainly the result of resource management rather than an inappropriate level of innovation or use of new technologies. In addition, the effect of exogenous factors on productivity is analysed using the Kruskal-Wallis (KW) test, finding that productivity levels were affected by the quality of the influent w…
The Luenberger productivity indicator in the water industry: An empirical analysis for England and Wales
2014
Abstract We innovate in the field of water companies' performance with an application of the directional distance function and the Luenberger productivity indicator (LPI) to the assessment of water companies' productivity growth. The advantage of our approach is that it takes into account both input contractions and output expansions. The analysis covered 22 water companies from England and Wales using data over the period 2001–2008. To the best of our knowledge, there are no prior studies applying the Luenberger productivity indicator to the water industry in England and Wales or other countries. For the sake of comparison, the traditional Malmquist productivity index (MPI) was also estima…
The links between smart specialisation strategy, the quintuple helix model and living labs
2018
This paper analyzes how the Living Labs can be designed as tools for a more effective implementation of the Smart Specialisation Strategy (S3) within the Quintuple Helix Model. Above all, the Quintuple Helix espouses the formation of a constructive situation encompassing ecology, knowledge and innovation, and creating extensive synergy between economy, society, and democracy. In this paper, we shall be focusing on the Quintuple Helix and Living Labs geared towards creating a shared arena in which services, processes and new ways of working via technology can be developed and tested with user representatives and researchers. Since the Living Lab is a rather new research area, the number of s…
A boundary element model for structural health monitoring using piezoelectric transducers
2013
In this paper, for the first time, the boundary element method (BEM) is used for modelling smart structures instrumented with piezoelectric actuators and sensors. The host structure and its cracks are formulated with the 3D dual boundary element method (DBEM), and the modelling of the piezoelectric transducers implements a 3D semi-analytical finite element approach. The elastodynamic analysis of the structure is performed in the Laplace domain and the time history is obtained by inverse Laplace transform. The sensor signals obtained from BEM simulations show excellent agreement with those from finite element modelling simulations and experiments. This work provides an alternative methodolog…
Performance of a pilot-scale biotrickling filter in controlling the volatile organic compound emissions in a furniture manufacturing facility.
2009
A 0.75-m3 pilot-scale biotrickling filter was run for over 1 yr in a Spanish furniture company to evaluate its performance in the removal of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) contained in the emission of two different paint spray booths. The first one was an open front booth used to manually paint furniture, and the second focus was an automatically operated closed booth operated to paint pieces of furniture. In both cases, the VOC emissions were very irregular, with rapid and extreme fluctuations. The pilot plant was operated at an empty bed residence time (EBRT) ranging from 10 to 40 sec, and good removal efficiencies of VOCs were usually obtained. When a buffering activated carbon prefil…
Assessment of data and parameter uncertainties in integrated water-quality model
2011
In integrated urban drainage water quality models, due to the fact that integrated approaches are basically a cascade of sub-models (simulating sewer system, wastewater treatment plant and receiving water body), uncertainty produced in one sub-model propagates to the following ones depending on the model structure, the estimation of parameters and the availability and uncertainty of measurements in the different parts of the system. Uncertainty basically propagates throughout a chain of models in which simulation output from upstream models is transferred to the downstream ones as input. The overall uncertainty can differ from the simple sum of uncertainties generated in each sub-model, dep…
Multi-step ahead electricity price forecasting using a hybrid model based on two-layer decomposition technique and BP neural network optimized by fir…
2017
In the deregulated competitive electricity market, the price which reflects the relationship between electricity supply and demand is one of the most important elements, making it crucial for all market participants to precisely forecast the electricity price. However, electricity price series usually has complex features such as non-linearity, non-stationarity and volatility, which makes the price forecasting turn out to be very difficult. In order to improve the accuracy of electricity price forecasting, this paper first proposes a two-layer decomposition technique and then develops a hybrid model based on fast ensemble empirical mode decomposition (FEEMD), variational mode decomposition …
An efficient analytical approach for obtaining a five parameters model of photovoltaic modules using only reference data
2013
Exploiting the equivalent one-diode circuit of a photovoltaic (PV) module, this paper proposes a novel and fully analytical model to predict the electrical performance upon solar irradiance intensity and PV module temperature. The model refers essentially to an equivalent circuit governed by five parameters and the extraction of them permits to describe the current–voltage curve of the PV panel and consequently permits to assess the energy output of PV modules. The proposed model extracts the five characteristic parameters using only exact analytical relationship and tabular data always available such as short-circuit current, open circuit voltage and the Maximum Power Point (MPP). The diff…
Video-Based Heartbeat Rate Measuring Method Using Ballistocardiography
2017
International audience; Video-based heartbeat rate measurement is a rapidly growing application in remote health monitoring. Video-based heartbeat rate measuring methods operate mainly by estimating photoplethysmography or ballistocardiography signals. These methods operate by estimating the microscopic color change in the face or by estimating the microscopic rigid motion of the head/facial skin. However, the robustness to motion artifacts caused by illumination variance and motion variance of the subject poses main challenge. We present a video-based heartbeat rate measuring framework to overcome these problems by using the principle of ballistocardiography. In this paper, we proposed a b…