Super insulated aerogel windows: Impact on daylighting and thermal performance.

Window design plays an important role in achieving energy efficient buildings and in providing thermal comfort of building occupants. This paper investigates a newly developed aerogel window and the potential improvement on the comfort factors of an office in relation to daylighting. Improved comfort levels can impact on health and wellbeing of building occupants leading to knock on effects on absenteeism and productivity. A simulation tool was presently created that will easily enable comparison of different façade design and their impact on heat and light transmission and therefore enable optimisation. One of the most important aspects of the present work was comparing the performance of the newly developed aerogel window against the more traditional Argon-filled, coated double-glazing. Whereas the aerogel window provided an extremely low heat-loss index of 0.3 W/m2K, the latter usually offered a centre-glazing U-value of 1.4 W/m2K. On a like-with-like basis the daylight transmission of the aerogel window was significantly lower than double-glazing. However, in view of low thermal loss larger areas of the former can be deployed. This article presents the influence of three key parameters that may lead to an optimum design: daylight, thermal loss and solar gain.

A new distributed MIKEY mode to secure e-health applications.

Securing e-health applications in the context of Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging. Indeed, resources scarcity in such environment hinders the implementation of existing standard based protocols. Among these protocols, MIKEY (Multimedia Internet KEYing) aims at establishing security credentials between two communicating entities. However, the existing MIKEY modes fail to meet IoT specificities. In particular, the pre-shared key mode is energy efficient, but suffers from severe scalability issues. On the other hand, asymmetric modes such as the public key mode are scalable, but are highly resource consuming. To address this issue, we combine two previously proposed approaches to introduce a new hybrid MIKEY mode. Indeed, relying on a cooperative approach, a set of third parties is used to discharge the constrained nodes from heavy computational operations. Doing so, the pre-shared mode is used in the constrained part of the network, while the public key mode is used in the unconstrained part of the network. Preliminary results show that our proposed mode is energy preserving whereas its security properties are kept safe.

Design and analysis of kinetic energy recovery system for automobiles: a case study for commuters in Edinburgh.

Transport and its energetic and environmental impacts affect our daily lives. The transport sector is the backbone of the United Kingdom’s economy with 2.3 million people being employed in this sector. With a high dependency on transport for passengers and freight and with the knowledge that oil reserves are rapidly decreasing a solution has to be identified for conserving fuel. Passenger vehicles account for 61% of the transport fuel consumed in the U.K. and should be seen as a key area to tackle. Despite the introduction and development of electric powered cars, the widespread infrastructure that is required is not in place and has attributed to their slow uptake, as well as the fact that the electric car’s performance is not yet comparable with the conventional internal combustion engine. The benefits of the introduction of kinetic energy recovery systems to be used in conjunction with internal combustion engines and designed such that the system could easily be fitted into future passenger vehicles are examined. In this article, a review of automobile kinetic energy recovery system is presented. It has been argued that the ultracapacitor technology offers a sustainable solution. An optimum design for the urban driving cycle experienced in the city of Edinburgh has been introduced. The potential for fuel savings is also presented