A novel hybrid finite-element/finite-volume numerical method is developed to determine the capillary rise of a liquid with a free surface (under surface tension and gravitational forces). The few known exact analytical solutions are used to verify the numerical computations and establish their accuracy for a range of liquid contact angles. The numerical method is then used to ascertain the limi...

Landscapes have been shown to exhibit numerous scaling laws from Horton's laws to more sophisticated scaling in topography heights, river network topology and power laws in several geomorphic attributes. In this paper, we propose a different way of examining landscape organization by introducing the “river corridor width” (lateral distance from the centerline of the river to the left and right ...

Atmospheric boundary layer winds experience two types of effects due to friction at the ground surface. One effect is the increase of the wind speeds with height above the surface. The second effect, called the Ekman layer effect, entails veering the change of the wind speed direction as a function of height above the surface. In this study a practical procedure is developed within a databaseas...

The search for solar buildings is one of the primary challenges in urban planning, especially when developing self-sustainable cities. This work uses an evolutionary approach for finding the optimal building model based on airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) laser-scanned data, regarding solar potential. The method considers self-adaptive differential evolution for solving the constrai...

The likelihood of line-of-sight (LoS) is an essential component in any radio channel model. It is particularly useful for radio network planning and urban coverage prediction. Empirical LoS models are hard to derive due to a strong dependency on local topology and the need for large measurement datasets. Since buildings are the major obstructions in a dense urban environment, we propose a new t...

The ventilation efficiency of three periodic building patterns equal total volume and packing density is investigated: street canyons bounded by H uniform 0.5H/1.5H variable height buildings, via wind tunnel measurements Large Eddy Simulation. numerical model utilizes the Transient Wind Forcing method to take effect eddies larger than domain size into account, a special Lagrangian dispersion mo...

Existing automatic building extraction methods are not effective in extracting buildings which are small in size and have transparent roofs. The application of large area threshold prohibits detection of small buildings and the use of ground points in generating the building mask prevents detection of transparent buildings. In addition, the existing methods use numerous parameters to extract bu...