Bamboo wells are an economical alternative for water supply wells in developing countries. The design of the bamboo well described in this article was developed based on field tests. Following field experiments, the screen in the bamboo well was fabricated with seven 3-m-long bamboo strips, each 2 cm wide and 1 cm thick. The strips were bolted on 1-cm-wide mild steel rings spaced 30 cm along th...

Designing spaces that are able to balance illumination, glare and solar gains over a whole year is a real challenge, yet a problem faced every day by building envelope designers. To assist them in this search, a full year, climate-based daylighting simulation method was developed, called Lightsolve, meant to be used early on in the design process when façade and space details have not yet been ...

Health care is one of the largest service industries in the U.S. economy, representing approximately 17 percent of the gross domestic product, according to World Bank data.1 From an environmental perspective, the average health care facility uses more energy than other commercial buildings, produces millions of tons of solid waste annually and utilizes various cleaning chemicals and hazardous c...

Design decisions software architects make directly impact system quality. Real-world systems involve a large number of such decisions, and each decision is typically influenced by others and involves trade-offs in system properties. This paper poses the problem of making complex, interacting design decision relatively early in the project’s lifecycle and outlines a search-based and simulationba...

Many theoretical and practical problems in science involve acquisition of data via indirect observations of a model or phenomena. Naturally, the observed data are determined by the physical properties of the model sought, as well as by the physical laws that govern the problem, however, they also depend on the experimental configuration. Unlike the model and the physical laws, the latter can be...