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Considerable Factors in Determining the Sustainability Benefits of the Demolition of an Existing Structure for a New Build and of the Renovation of an Existing Structure
Get PDFThe decision between whether to demolish or renovate a building comes down to which one will satisfy the owner’s needs and objectives while remaining within budget. This project will identify factors in determining sustainability benefits between a completely new construction project that demolishes the existing structure prior to rebuilding and a renovation project that reuses some or all of the existing structure. Research on construction data, interviews conducted with leading industry members, and journals that reported on both these strategies are presented. This project will examine considerations that reduce the demolition’s negative impact on the environment and improve the overall lifecycle of the building, which includes the use of a construction and demolition waste plant to turn that waste into recycled aggregates. The new construction after demolition allows for the installation of modern energy systems that use sustainable and efficient building designs and lead to a long-lasting building lifecycle. Demolition provides higher cost savings and sustainability benefits to the building and its operations due to the ability to reduce the negative impacts of waste by recycling and being equipped with modern technology to improve energy savings through its design and its mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. A design that foresees future upgrades or renovations will improve the lifecycle of a building, leading to greater cost reduction and sustainability benefits by making future improvements more feasible and cost-effective
New God Video Game
Get PDFArtificial Intelligence is used in all sorts of ways in various types of media. AI is often applied to Interactive entertainment such as video games. One of the most important parts of designing an AI for a video game is considering how “intelligent” it should be for better user enjoyment. For instance, making the AI too simple can cause frustration and impatience in the player, and making the AI too advanced can result in unexpected side effects and/or the player not getting personal satisfaction from in-game accomplishments. My goal for this project was to figure out what level of “intelligence” is ideal for a “management” type video game, where the gameplay is centered on managing several AI characters rather than controlling their own character. Because the gameplay almost entirely relies on player-AI interaction, a well-designed AI is necessary. New God has the player interacting with several characters in an undeveloped environment, with the goal of building a thriving community of AI characters
A Novel Approach to Extending Music Using Latent Diffusion
Get PDFUsing deep learning to synthetically generate music is a research domain that has gained more attention from the public in the past few years. A subproblem of music generation is music extension, or the task of taking existing music and extending it. This work proposes the Continuer Pipeline, a novel technique that uses deep learning to take music and extend it in 5 second increments. It does this by treating the musical generation process as an image generation problem; we utilize latent diffusion models (LDMs) to generate spectrograms, which are image representations of music. The Continuer Pipeline is able to receive a waveform as an input, and its output will be what the pipeline predicts the next five seconds might sound like. We trained the Continuer Pipeline using the expansive diffusion model functionality provided by the HuggingFace platform, and our dataset consisted of 256x256 spectrogram images representing 5-second snippets of various hip-hop songs from Spotify. The musical waveforms generated by the Continuer Pipeline are currently at a much lower quality compared to human-generated music, but we affirm that the Continuer Pipeline still has many uses in its current state, and we describe many avenues for future improvement to this technology
Characterization of Ground Albedo Materials for Bifacial Solar Farms
Get PDFBifacial photovoltaics can collect solar energy from both sides, unlike regular one-sided solar panels. With the ability to collect energy from both sides, the energy production of bifacial photovoltaic farms is about 2-6% more efficient than typical solar farms. However, the increase in efficiency is highly dependent on the reflectivity of the ground material. This project explores six different materials to determine which material would be best to implement as a ground material for a bifacial photovoltaic farm, based on their mechanical properties and albedo value. Albedo refers to the ratio between the reflected solar radiation to the incident solar radiation, and ranges between 0 and 1. The tested sheet samples were: Unreinforced Polyethylene (PE), Scrim Reinforced Polyethylene (SR-PE), Woven Polyethylene (W-PE), White Road Paint with reflective glass beads (RPB), Mylar (M), and Woven Polypropylene (W-PP). The samples had their albedo recorded three days a week, during morning and afternoon readings, at specific angles as dictated in the ASTM E1918-21 standard. This is to observe the environmental factors\u27 effect on the albedo. Also, some samples were placed in an accelerated weathering machine which exposed the samples to high levels of UV radiation to mimic extended periods of sun exposure. The samples were then tensile tested after the UV exposure to record impact in mechanical properties. The results concluded that if the requirement is to have a high albedo, RPB and M are the best option. M is the best option if cost is also considered. If ease of installation and maintenance is a high priority SR-PE becomes a top choice
