House at Bogwest, Wexford, Ireland: Steve Larkin Architect

Critical review of House at Bogwest by Steve Larkin Architects. Text by editorial team, drawings by Steve Larkin and photographs by Alice Clancy.

TEXTILE TECHNOLOGIES IN CONCRETE ENVIRONMENTS."

Girli Concrete is a cross disciplinary funded research project based in the University of Ulster involving a textile designer/ researcher, an architect/ academic and a concrete manufacturing firm.
Girli Concrete brings together concrete and textile technologies, testing ideas of
concrete as textile and textile as structure. It challenges the perception of textiles as only the ‘dressing’ to structure and instead integrates textile technologies into the products of building products. Girli Concrete uses ‘low tech’ methods of wet and dry concrete casting in combination with ‘high tech’ textile methods using laser cutting, etching, flocking and digital printing. Whilst we have been inspired by recent print and imprint techniques in architectural cladding, Girli Concrete is generated within the depth of the concrete’s cement paste “skin”, bringing the trades and crafts of both industries together with innovative results.
Architecture and Textiles have an odd, somewhat unresolved relationship. Confined to a subservient role in architecture, textiles exist chiefly within the categories of soft furnishings and interior design. Girli Concrete aims to mainstream tactility in the production of built environment products, raising the human and environmental interface to the same specification level as the technical. This paper will chart:
The background and wider theoretical concerns to the project.
The development of Girli Concrete, highlighting the areas where craft becomes
art and art becomes science in the combination of textile and concrete
technologies.
The challenges of identifying funding to support such combination technologies,
working methods and philosophies.
The challenges of generating and sustaining practice within an academic
research environment
The outcomes to date

Design and Flux-Weakening Control of an Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor for Electric Vehicles

Permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) provide a competitive technology for EV traction drives owing to their high power density and high efficiency. In this paper, three types of interior PMSMs with different PM arrangements are modeled by the finite element method (FEM). For a given amount of permanent magnet materials, the V-shape interior PMSM is found better than the U-shape and the conventional rotor topologies for EV traction drives. Then the V-shape interior PMSM is further analyzed with the effects of stator slot opening and the permanent magnet pole chamfering on cogging torque and output torque performance. A vector-controlled flux-weakening method is developed and simulated in Matlab to expand the motor speed range for EV drive system. The results show good dynamic and steady-state performance with a capability of expanding speed up to four times of the rated. A prototype of the V-shape interior PMSM is also manufactured and tested to validate the numerical models built by the FEM.

Teaching Art History to Design Students

Art History is often seen as a mandatory core course in the curricula of design programs but it is rarely tailored to the needs and goals of such programs. Instead, the traditional chronological organization of lecture topics, invariably beginning with the “Venus of Willendorf” (c. 25,000 BC) is presented in order to impart to the students a supposed holistic “big picture.” This essay outlines the re-structuring of a two-semester first-year faculty-wide introductory art history course, entitled “History of Art and Design,” in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Design at Izmir University of Economics, Izmir, Turkey. The course was re-configured from a conventional chronologically-presented (time-oriented) lecture series to a thematically presented (topic-oriented) lecture series more relevant to the students of the faculty – architecture, interior architecture, graphic design, industrial design, and fashion design students.

Web crippling behaviour of cold-formed steel channel sections with offset web holes subjected to interior-two-flange loading

Cold-formed steel sections are often used as wall studs or floor joists; such sections often include web holes for ease of installation of the services. Cold-formed steel design codes, however, do not consider the effect of such web holes. In this paper, a combination of experimental tests and non-linear elasto-plastic finite element analyses are used to investigate the effect of such holes on web crippling under interior-two-flange (ITF) loading conditions; the cases of both flange fastened and flange unfastened are considered. A good agreement between the experimental tests and finite element analyses was obtained. The finite element model was then used for the purposes of a parametric study on the effect of different sizes and position of holes in the web. It was demonstrated that the main factors influencing the web crippling strength are the ratio of the hole depth to the depth of the web, and the ratio of the distance from the edge of the bearing to the flat depth of web. Design recommendations in the form of web crippling strength reduction factors are proposed, that are conservative to both the experimental and finite element results.

Cold-formed steel sections with web openings subjected to web crippling under two-flange loading conditions - Part II: Parametric study and proposed design equations

A parametric study of cold-formed steel sections with web openings subjected to web crippling was undertaken using finite element analysis, to investigate the effects of web holes and cross-section sizes on the web crippling strengths of channel sections subjected to web crippling under both interior-two-flange (ITF) and end-two-flange (ETF) loading conditions. In both loading conditions, the hole was centred beneath the bearing plate. It was demonstrated that the main factors influencing the web crippling strength are the ratio of the hole depth to the flat depth of the web, and the ratio of the length of bearing plates to the flat depth of the web. In this paper, design recommendations in the form of web crippling strength reduction factors are proposed, that are conservative to both the experimental and finite element results.

Design and testing of transonic linear cascade tunnel with optimized slotted walls

In linear cascade wind tunnel tests, a high level of pitchwise periodicity is desirable to reproduce the azimuthal periodicity in the stage of an axial compressor or turbine. Transonic tests in a cascade wind tunnel with open jet boundaries have been shown to suffer from spurious waves, reflected at the jet boundary, that compromise the flow periodicity in pitch. This problem can be tackled by placing at this boundary a slotted tailboard with a specific wall void ratio s and pitch angle a. The optimal value of the s-a pair depends on the test section geometry and on the tunnel running conditions. An inviscid two-dimensional numerical method has been developed to predict transonic linear cascade flows, with and without a tailboard, and quantify the nonperiodicity in the discharge. This method includes a new computational boundary condition to model the effects of the tailboard slots on the cascade interior flow. This method has been applied to a six-blade turbine nozzle cascade, transonically tested at the University of Leicester. The numerical results identified a specific slotted tailboard geometry, able to minimize the spurious reflected waves and regain some pitchwise flow periodicity. The wind tunnel open jet test section was redesigned accordingly. Pressure measurements at the cascade outlet and synchronous spark schlieren visualization of the test section, with and without the optimized slotted tailboard, have confirmed the gain in pitchwise periodicity predicted by the numerical model. Copyright © 2006 by ASME.

An Efficient Precoder Design for Multiuser MIMO Cognitive Radio Networks with Interference Constraints

We consider a linear precoder design for an underlay cognitive radio multiple-input multiple-output broadcast channel, where the secondary system consisting of a secondary base-station (BS) and a group of secondary users (SUs) is allowed to share the same spectrum with the primary system. All the transceivers are equipped with multiple antennas, each of which has its own maximum power constraint. Assuming zero-forcing method to eliminate the multiuser interference, we study the sum rate maximization problem for the secondary system subject to both per-antenna power constraints at the secondary BS and the interference power constraints at the primary users. The problem of interest differs from the ones studied previously that often assumed a sum power constraint and/or single antenna employed at either both the primary and secondary receivers or the primary receivers. To develop an efficient numerical algorithm, we first invoke the rank relaxation method to transform the considered problem into a convex-concave problem based on a downlink-uplink result. We then propose a barrier interior-point method to solve the resulting saddle point problem. In particular, in each iteration of the proposed method we find the Newton step by solving a system of discrete-time Sylvester equations, which help reduce the complexity significantly, compared to the conventional method. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate fast convergence and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. 

Threshold Magic: Impressionism and the Domestic Interior

This article focuses on the liminal space of the threshold in paintings by female Impressionists. It engages with Cultural theory and History of Design in order to offer a new interpretation of domestic spaces