Numerical optimisation of water curtain barriers design

The interactions between water curtain protective barriers and impinging cold gas clouds released during industrial accidents are simulated by a 2D finite difference code using a PSI-cell of the heat, mass and momentum transfer processes between the phases. A consistent derivation of the continuous phase source terms is presented. The results of early simulations of an existing 1:10 experimental model of a water curtain impacted by a cold gas cloud are presented for two typical curtain configurations.

Lost in Translation, book review of Urban Landscape Perspectives

In Sofia Coppola's 2003 film Lost in Translation, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson's characters find themselves culturally stranded and oddly mismatched as an improvised tourist couple in contemporary Tokyo. This is an urban landscape that they cannot comprehend but only temporarily experience, in a fragmented and surreptitious way that allows no possible understanding and categorizations, but offers physical inclusion, emotional participation and momentary embeddedness.

FUELGEN: effective evolutionary design of refuellings for pressurized water reactors

The paper describes the design of an efficient and robust genetic algorithm for the nuclear fuel loading problem (i.e., refuellings: the in-core fuel management problem) - a complex combinatorial, multimodal optimisation., Evolutionary computation as performed by FUELGEN replaces heuristic search of the kind performed by the FUELCON expert system (CAI 12/4), to solve the same problem. In contrast to the traditional genetic algorithm which makes strong requirements on the representation used and its parameter setting in order to be efficient, the results of recent research results on new, robust genetic algorithms show that representations unsuitable for the traditional genetic algorithm can still be used to good effect with little parameter adjustment. The representation presented here is a simple symbolic one with no linkage attributes, making the genetic algorithm particularly easy to apply to fuel loading problems with differing core structures and assembly inventories. A nonlinear fitness function has been constructed to direct the search efficiently in the presence of the many local optima that result from the constraint on solutions.

Sustainable Olympic design and urban development

With appropriate planning and design, Olympic urban development has the potential to leave positive environmental legacies to the host city and contribute to environmental sustainability. This book explains how a modern Olympic games can successfully develop a more sustainable design approach by learning from the lessons of the past and by taking account of the latest developments. It offers an assessment tool that can be tailored to individual circumstances – a tool which emerges from the analysis of previous summer games host cities and from techniques in environmental analysis and assessment.

The comparative advantage of the public sector in the development of urban water supply

This paper addresses the potential of public water operations in achieving developmental goals such as the Millennium Development Goals, and argues that the public sector has a comparative advantage in developing water services. The global importance of the public sector in urban water supply is examined through a review of current practice in the world's largest cities, including operational presence and distribution and ongoing trends. Empirical evidence shows that, in transition and developing countries, public operators are capable of undergoing successful reform. One explanatory factor is proposed to be the creation through the public sphere of highly interconnected networks among stakeholders. Such accountability networks act as vehicles for the generation and distribution of public knowledge among stakeholders, which in turn inform rational decision making on the reform and management of operations.