With increase in awareness of the risks posed by climate change and increasingly severe weather events, attention has turned to the need for urgent action. While strategies to respond to flooding and drought are well-established, the effects - and effective response - to heat waves is much less understood. As heat waves become more frequent, longer-lasting and more intense, the Cool Towns project provides cities and municipalities with the knowledge and tools to become heat resilient. The first step to developing effective heat adaptation strategies is identifying which areas in the city experience the most heat stress and who are the residents most affected. This enables decision-makers to prioritise heat adaptation measures and develop a city-wide strategy.The Urban Heat Atlas is the result of four years of research. It contains a collection of heat related maps covering more than 40,000 hectares of urban areas in ten municipalities in England, Belgium, The Netherlands, and France. The maps demonstrate how to conduct a Thermal Comfort Assessment (TCA) systematically to identify heat vulnerabilities and cooling capacity in cities to enable decision-makers to set priorities for action. The comparative analyses of the collated maps also provide a first overview of the current heat resilience state of cities in North-Western Europe.
DOCUMENT
gains and internal gains from appliances,heat gains from occupants are an importantsource contributing to space heating indomestic buildings. It is necessary toconsciously consider all of these heat gainswhen aiming at accurately estimating theheat loss coefficient (HLC) of a building.Whilst sensor technology and algorithms areavailable to quantify the contribution of theheating system, solar gains and electricalappliances, the accurate estimation of thesensible heat gain from occupants ischallenging due to its stochastic character.
MULTIFILE
While the optimal mean annual temperature for people and nations is said to be between 13 °C and 18 °C, many people live productive lives in regions or countries that commonly exceed this temperature range. One such country is Australia. We carried out an Australia-wide online survey using a structured questionnaire to investigate what temperature people in Australia prefer, both in terms of the local climate and within their homes. More than half of the 1665 respondents (58%) lived in their preferred climatic zone with 60% of respondents preferring a warm climate. Those living in Australia's cool climate zones least preferred that climate. A large majority (83%) were able to reach a comfortable temperature at home with 85% using air-conditioning for cooling. The preferred temperature setting for the air-conditioning devices was 21.7 °C (SD: 2.6 °C). Higher temperature set-points were associated with age, heat tolerance and location. The frequency of air-conditioning use did not depend on the location but rather on a range of other socio-economic factors including having children in the household, the building type, heat stress and heat tolerance. We discuss the role of heat acclimatisation and impacts of increasing air-conditioning use on energy consumption.
MULTIFILE
The integration of renewable energy resources, controllable devices and energy storage into electricity distribution grids requires Decentralized Energy Management to ensure a stable distribution process. This demands the full integration of information and communication technology into the control of distribution grids. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is used to communicate measurements and commands between individual components and the control server. In the future this control is especially needed at medium voltage and probably also at the low voltage. This leads to an increased connectivity and thereby makes the system more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. According to the research agenda NCSRA III, the energy domain is becoming a prime target for cyber-attacks, e.g., abusing control protocol vulnerabilities. Detection of such attacks in SCADA networks is challenging when only relying on existing network Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Although these systems were designed specifically for SCADA, they do not necessarily detect malicious control commands sent in legitimate format. However, analyzing each command in the context of the physical system has the potential to reveal certain inconsistencies. We propose to use dedicated intrusion detection mechanisms, which are fundamentally different from existing techniques used in the Internet. Up to now distribution grids are monitored and controlled centrally, whereby measurements are taken at field stations and send to the control room, which then issues commands back to actuators. In future smart grids, communication with and remote control of field stations is required. Attackers, who gain access to the corresponding communication links to substations can intercept and even exchange commands, which would not be detected by central security mechanisms. We argue that centralized SCADA systems should be enhanced by a distributed intrusion-detection approach to meet the new security challenges. Recently, as a first step a process-aware monitoring approach has been proposed as an additional layer that can be applied directly at Remote Terminal Units (RTUs). However, this allows purely local consistency checks. Instead, we propose a distributed and integrated approach for process-aware monitoring, which includes knowledge about the grid topology and measurements from neighboring RTUs to detect malicious incoming commands. The proposed approach requires a near real-time model of the relevant physical process, direct and secure communication between adjacent RTUs, and synchronized sensor measurements in trustable real-time, labeled with accurate global time-stamps. We investigate, to which extend the grid topology can be integrated into the IDS, while maintaining near real-time performance. Based on topology information and efficient solving of power flow equation we aim to detect e.g. non-consistent voltage drops or the occurrence of over/under-voltage and -current. By this, centrally requested switching commands and transformer tap change commands can be checked on consistency and safety based on the current state of the physical system. The developed concepts are not only relevant to increase the security of the distribution grids but are also crucial to deal with future developments like e.g. the safe integration of microgrids in the distribution networks or the operation of decentralized heat or biogas networks.
Residential electricity distribution grid capacityis based on the typical peak load of a house and the loadsimultaneity factor. Historically, these values have remainedpredictable, but this is expected to change due to increasingelectric heating using heat pumps and rooftop solar panelelectricity generation. It is currently unclear how this increasein electrification will impact household peak load and loadsimultaneity, and hence the required grid capacity of residentialelectricity distribution grids. To gain better insight, transformerand household load measurements were taken in an all-electricneighborhood over a period of three years. These measurementswere analyzed to determine how heat pumps and solar panelswill alter peak load and load simultaneity and hence gridcapacity design parameters. Moreover, the potential for smartgrids to reduce peak loads and load simultaneity, and hencereduce required grid capacities, was examined.
To optimize patient care, it is vital to prevent infections in healthcare facilities. In this respect, the increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains threatens public healthcare. Current gold standard techniques are based on classical microbiological assays that are time consuming and need complex expensive lab environments. This limits their use for high throughput bacterial screening to perform optimal hygiene control. The infection prevention workers in hospitals and elderly nursing homes underline the urgency of a point-of-care tool that is able to detect bacterial loads on-site in a fast, precise and reliable manner while remaining with the available budgets. The aim of this proposal titled SURFSCAN is to develop a novel point-of-care tool for bacterial load screening on various surfaces throughout the daily routine of professionals in healthcare facilities. Given the expertise of the consortium partners, the point-of-care tool will be based on a biomimetic sensor combining surface imprinted polymers (SIPs), that act as synthetic bacterial receptors, with a thermal read-out strategy for detection. The functionality and performance of this biomimetic sensor has been shown in lab conditions and published in peer reviewed journals. Within this proposal, key elements will be optimized to translate the proof of principle concept into a complete clinical prototype for on-site application. These elements are essential for final implementation of the device as a screening and assessment tool for scanning bacterial loads on surfaces by hospital professionals. The research project offers a unique collaboration among different end-users (hospitals and SMEs), and knowledge institutions (Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Fontys University of Applied Sciences and Maastricht Science Programme, IDEE-Maastricht University), which guarantees transfer of fundamental knowledge to the market and end-user needs.
