Solar Collectors for Historic Homes : Linking consumption to perceptions of space

Reduction of household energy consumption is one of the top issues in contemporary discussions on sustainable consumption. This chapter concerns one way through which consumption of purchased energy for house heating can be reduced; by having a solar thermal system added to one's house. However, the fact that one of the components - the solar collector - usually is situated on the roof or the facade of a building, is a recurrent impediment to such installations. In certain contexts, these attributes may melt into the building, while in others, they may be perceived as problematic. The latter may particularly be the case when the appearance of the building is of major imiportance, as with houses deemed worthy of preservation for coming generations. This chapter draws upon a study carried out in Visby Town, a walled Hanseatic town and a World Heritage site on the island of Gotland, Sweden.

Image processing technique to count the number of logs in a timber truck

This paper summarises the results of using image processing technique to get information about the load of timber trucks before their arrival using digital images or geo tagged images. Once the images are captured and sent to sawmill by drivers from forest, we can predict their arrival time using geo tagged coordinates, count the number of (timber) logs piled up in a truck, identify their type and calculate their diameter. With this information we can schedule and prioritise the inflow and unloading of trucks in the light of production schedules and raw material stocks available at the sawmill yard. It is important to keep all the actors in a supply chain integrated coordinated, so that optimal working routines can be reached in the sawmill yard.