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The concept of "historic buildings" is cultural with evolutionary characteristics, mainly constructed in the category of historical culture and people's living settlements. "Public art" is an artistic asset with aesthetic attributes in urban living spaces. It contains two connotations, "cultural landscape" and "cultural route", which form an artistic symbol of urban architectural space at the same time. Along with the progress of an urban renewal plan, a local culture characterized the urban landscape, making architecture a tool used to convey cultural identity spatially. Two coexisting issues can be seen through the accumulated structure and long-term changes of historic buildings, a region's appearance, and the content of the traditional architectural styles—cultural value preservation and modern urban renewal—which ferment and generate decision-making discussion of design subtly in every corner of a city. This study examines the extant literature and the design model of public art landscape setting to construct a design model that balances the cultural value of historic buildings, and the landscape of public art has been proposed as a result of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the movable fire loads and the characteristics of combustible materials in Japanese-style wooden historical buildings via field surveys and cone calorimeter experiments. Twenty-one historical buildings with 102 rooms and a total floor area of 2235.06 m2 were surveyed to determine the movable fire load. Strong correlations among fire load density, compartment floor area, and spatial use are found in this survey. The mean values of the movable fire load density in decreasing order in terms of room use are storeroom (431.38 MJ/m2), study room (298 MJ/m2), bedroom (294.88 MJ/m2), reception room (287.20 MJ/m2), and dining room (217.11 MJ/m2), providing fire engineering design with a reliable fire load setting in various types of rooms in historical buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire safety is an important issue in all types of construction, especially in wooden-frame historical buildings. In this study, room fire experiments were conducted in a full-scale model storeroom with high fire load in a wooden historical building to explore fire growth and spread via heat release rates and indoor air temperatures. Numerical simulations mimicking the fire scenario were conducted using FDS software to predict fire features, and these findings were compared with the experimental results. The results showed that development trends during fire growth were aligned, but they displayed time differences. During the fully developed fire period, the heat release rates from the experiment were less than the predicted values. The reason for the low heat release rates in the experiment was that the collapse and stacking of fire loads were not effectively simulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study combines microencapsulated phase change materials (mPCMs) (core material: paraffin; melting points: 37 and 43 °C) and aluminum honeycomb boards (8 mm core cell) to form mPCM roof modules and investigates their heat absorption and release performances, as well as their impact on indoor heat gain by conducting experiments over a 24-h period, subject to representative weather. The outdoor boundary conditions of the module are hourly sunlight and nighttime natural cooling; on the indoor side of the module, the conditions are daytime air conditioning and nighttime natural cooling. The results indicate that compared to a roof module with a 43 °C melting point mPCM, the roof module with a 37 °C melting point mPCM had improved peak load-shifting capacity, but had a slightly increased indoor heat gain. The mPCMs in both roof modules were successfully cooled during the night, returning to their initial state, to begin a new thermal cycle the next day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appropriate spatial temperature sensing is recognized as one of the main challenges for thermostats used in air conditioners. In this study, a motivation is emerged to change this return-air-sensing by integrating the concept of distributed environment sensing toward the air-conditioning system (DES-A/C). An improved A/C system was established incorporating distributed environmental sensing by wireless sensor networks. Experimental research with two different treatments, single-point and multi-point user-neighborhood sensing, has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of this concept. It has been revealed that DES-A/C could save 43% energy compared to conventional A/C. In addition, DES-A/C could maintain the predicted mean vote (PMV) index in satisfaction range (−1 < PMV < +1) and predicted percentage of dissatisfied index no more than 27.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Experiments were conducted in a full-scale model office equipped with movable and fixed fire loads to explore the influence of ignition source (movable fire load(s)) conditions on smoke detector and sprinkler actuation. The interior plan dimension is 5.7 m × 4.7 m and the net ceiling height is 3.3 m. Both northeast and southeast wings have a 2.1 m × 0.9 m single door to be opened. Seven fire scenarios (seven different ignited fire load configurations) under natural ventilation were investigated experimentally. The results show that the amount of fire load at the initial stage in a room fire does not markedly affect smoke generation and does not significantly impact the actuation time of the smoke detectors. When the fire source is located near a corner, the plume corner effect greatly increases; smoke detectors and sprinklers can activate quickly and effectively actuate the fire suppression. When the fire source is located in the room''s center, given the uncertainty regarding smoke detector and sprinkler actuation, it may not be possible to control the fire spread. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: An experiment is conducted on a full-scale model office and an actual sprinkler system to explore the influence of fire source locations on sprinkler actuation. The office space is a brick structure that measures 5.7m in interior length, 4.7m in width and 2.4m in ceiling height, and equipped with a sprinkler system. The investigated fire source (100kW LPG burner) locations include the room center, wall centers, room corner, and other locations at different distances from sprinklers. The results show that actuation of the sprinklers is affected by the fire source locations and the heat conduction properties of the glass temperature-sensing bulb. Average actuation time of all the tests is 102s, around 40s faster than if the fire source is located in the room center. For fire sources in corners, sprinklers are quickly activated at the experimental time 75s, showing concentrated hot gas flow. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The pedestrian wind environment in a street canyon is affected by a multitude of factors, including the height and geometric shape of the surrounding buildings, the street width, the wind direction, and speed. Wind-tunnel tests were performed to determine the effects of constructing high buildings in an urban renewal project in New Taipei City, Taiwan on the pedestrian wind environments in the surrounding street canyons. The results show that replacing the original low-rise buildings with high-rise buildings could decrease the wind speed and natural ventilation potential in certain surrounding street canyons. The flow fields generated by approaching winds in various street canyons are highly complex in this practical case study. Thus, the pedestrian wind patterns in the street canyons cannot be interpreted in terms of channeling and shielding effects alone, as is typically reported in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study experimentally investigates the natural convection heat transfer performance of a rectangular thermosyphon with an aspect ratio of 3.5. The experimental model is divided into a loop body, a heating section, a cooling section, and two adiabatic sections. The heating section and the cooling section are located in the vertical legs of the rectangular loop. The length of the vertical heating section and the length of the upper and lower horizontal insulation sections are 700 mm and 200 mm, respectively, and the inner diameter of the loop is 11 mm. The relevant parameters and their ranges are as follows: the input thermal power is 30–60 W (with a heat flux in the range of 60–3800 W/m2); the temperature in the cooling section is 30, 40, or 50 °C; and the potential difference between the hot and cold sections is 5, 11, or 18 for the cooling section lengths of 60, 45, and 30 cm, respectively. The results indicate that the value of the dimensionless heat transfer coefficient, the Nusselt number, is generally between 5 and 10. The heating power is the main factor affecting the natural convection intensity of the thermosyphon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many methods based on spectrophotometric, fluorometric, piezoresistive, amperometric or conductive measurements have been proposed for detecting the concentration of formaldehyde in air. However, conventional formaldehyde measurement systems are bulky and expensive and require the services of highly-trained operators. Accordingly, the emergence of sophisticated technologies in recent years has prompted the development of many microscale gaseous formaldehyde detection systems. Besides their compact size, such devices have many other advantages over their macroscale counterparts, including a real-time response, a more straightforward operation, lower power consumption, and the potential for low-cost batch production. This paper commences by providing a high level overview of the formaldehyde gas sensing field and then describes some of the more significant real-time sensors presented in the literature over the past 10 years or so.