Thesis and Research Data Repository Leeds Beckett University
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A Case Study on Retrofitting of an Existing Residential Building in Germany for Energy Efficiency and Performance
No full textDepleting energy sources and climate change are important concerns of the world today, and buildings have a considerable share in energy consumption. Taking into account the large ratio of existing buildings to new construction, reducing energy consumption and focusing on energy-efficient retrofitting of existing buildings become essential for sustainable development, and passive design strategies can improve the performance of the building. In this scope, this study was aimed at achieving energy efficiency and investigating the impact of glazing systems and the strategy of implementing a buffer zone to the north facade on annual energy consumption and cost of the building. To this end, a residential building located in Berlin called Scheibe Nord was studied, and energy analyses of before and after retrofitting conditions were conducted by using Autodesk Revit Architecture and Insight. In addition, photovoltaic panels were recommended for the retrofitting project, and alternative flats were proposed to contribute to the social aspect of sustainability. The results showed that triple glazing and focusing on the north facade with passive design strategies in Berlin can decrease overall consumption and energy costs. The reduction in energy usage can encourage owners and policymakers at governmental institutions to launch extensive retrofitting campaigns to address the current energy crisis.</p
The Greenest Way to Get Through the Great Firewall of China? An Energy Audit of Common Circumvention Tools Against the Great Firewall
No full textIn China, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) blocks or restricts access to various online content and services. To access the Internet without restrictions, many Chinese netizens use circumvention tools that employ encryption and obfuscation techniques to evade detection and filtering of the GFW, which increase the energy consumption of the devices and servers involved. This paper aims to compare the energy efficiency of five common circumvention tools: WireGuard VPN, Shadowsocks, V2ray, Xray, and Trojan-Go. An energy audit is conducted for each tool by measuring the energy consumption on the client side when downloading a specific file from a target server. Based on the empirical results, WireGuard VPN was recommended as the most energy-efficient tool, while Shadowsocks and WireGuard VPN both ranked the highest in the comprehensive score considering both energy and time consumptions.</p
Benchmarking Power and Energy Consumption of Stream Processing Frameworks
No full textThe exponential growth of real-time data-centric systems relies on the continuous processing of large data streams through stream processing frameworks. However, these frameworks are resource-intensive, require numerous dependencies and induce high computing loads, resulting in increased energy consumption and carbon emissions. The selection of an appropriate stream processing framework can significantly reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint within a company’s IT infrastructure. While several studies have compared the performance of stream processing frameworks, none have specifically examined them from a sustainability standpoint. This report aims to bridge this gap by conducting a comparison of energy consumption and performance among three different frameworks: Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, and Spark Structured Streaming. To achieve this, we implemented a realworld use case in Java and conducted multiple experiments at varying streaming rates, while monitoring the systems using Prometheus and Grafana. Our findings indicate that, on average, Kafka Streams and Apache Flink exhibit lower power and energy consumption compared to the Spark Structured Streaming module. Among the two, Flink proves to be the most efficient in terms of power for medium to high throughput applications, while Kafka Streams is most suitable when tolerating lower throughput, as both frameworks demonstrate similar power consumption levels. Additionally, we also analysed the CPU and RAM usage of each framework, revealing distinct patterns for each stream processing engine.</p
Identification of Movement Patterns in Rugby Football League using GPS data: Algorithms and Applications
No full textThis PhD study is based on considering the sequential nature of match activity occurrences to understand the (physical) demand of games on players as well as uncover players’ behavioural movement patterns during competitive matches.
It involves quantifying players’ external load (i.e., completed match activities) using movement patterns that provide information on how players accumulated external load in contrast to existing physical and technical-tactical performance indicators.
The quantification of external load helps with team and player improvement, training specificity and even talent identification and recruitment.
Elite players of rugby football league were considered as the participants of this PhD study because rugby league is a physically intense team sport where activities happen quickly and within a stipulated timeframe.
Existing player movement profiling frameworks were investigated which revealed the use of a sequential pattern mining algorithm to extract movement patterns.
However, the algorithm for extracting patterns in the existing player movement profiling frameworks is found to have limitations such as the identification of few movement patterns, providing only the longest common patterns within a cluster of movement sequences while it discards other interesting patterns.
Furthermore, a review of sequential pattern mining algorithms revealed none of the existing algorithms is suitable for player movement profiling.
The state-of-the-art algorithm for extracting closed contiguous patterns (i.e., CCSpan) does not scale well on large data as well as data with long rows of sequences.
Also, the CCSpan algorithm is without a parameter to define a maximal length of extract patterns which is useful as a sliding window.
This PhD study's contributions to the body of knowledge include the development and optimisation of a novel pattern mining algorithm for extracting user-defined length of frequent closed contiguous patterns, called LCCspm (l-length closed contiguous sequential pattern mining), among others.
An intrinsic evaluation of the LCCspm algorithm was considered in terms of speed and memory consumption performance measures.
Results revealed it is four, seven or ten times faster than the state-of-the-art algorithm when tested on natural data in three different use cases.
An extrinsic evaluation of the LCCspm algorithm reveals and validates that its movement patterns are best to profile players into playing positions when compared to other distinct types of obtainable movement patterns.
Furthermore, this PhD study applied LCCspm and other artificial intelligence algorithms to discover signature movement patterns of elite rugby league players per playing position, identify (key) movement patterns as predictor variables for classifying players into playing positions, and later establish a set of movement performance indicator useful for assessing players’ performance variability across playing positions.
In the broader scope of computing, this PhD study contributes LCCspm algorithm as an advancement of pattern mining algorithms.
The application of LCCspm can be extended to other sports domains and challenges, allowing for more accurate analysis and insights into player behaviour and team dynamics.
Additionally, LCCspm can be applied in any field where the consecutiveness of items matters during the analysis of patterns
The construction and negotiation of male depression in online forums
No full textDepression is less commonly diagnosed in men, possibly, as a function of masculinity norms, endorsing emotional control and self-management. This has clear implications for men’s mental health, considering that some men who experience depression often do not make use of appropriate support resources. In this thesis I embarked upon an exploration of men’s accounts of their depression, aiming to enhance current understandings of men’s experiences of depression, and to contribute to the improvement of mental health promotion for men who experience depression. I selected to work with online unsolicited narratives in an attempt to move away from some of the disadvantages associated with the use of interviews. I conducted three studies, using constructivist grounded theory. In Study 1, I analysed online interactions of men who experience depression from four online forums. In Study 2 I included online interactions of female partners of men with depression. Lastly, in Study 3, I worked with a video, and the associated commentary, from a social media platform where contributors were discussing stoicism in men with depression. Overall, the findings from the studies show the prevalence of stoicism in men with depression. Male forum users who experienced depression often used online forums to access support, but also as a way of self-managing their depression by relying on forum support. Additionally, men’s stoicism was often underpinned by adherence to regressive masculinity norms. Stoicism in men with depression was further promoted via the elicitation of complicity from female partners. The findings further show that younger users of these digital spaces often voiced anti-stoic messages and showed increased levels of openness to emotional expressiveness and to help-seeking. My recommendations for further research include the areas of female partners’ experiences and younger people’s perspectives. Furthermore, I make suggestions that could help clinical practice and mental health initiatives to reach out to men who experience depression more effectively
Architecture Knowledge Work: A User's Manual
No full textArchitecture Knowledge Work: A User’s Manual aims to formulate a theory for the production of architectural discourses recognising the centrality of personal — autobiographical — experience in contemporary modes of knowledge production. The thesis is a collection of stories that reveal how: the production of knowledge came to be recognised as a form of labour, i.e.’ knowledge work’, that engages the worker at an existential level (chapter one); how the form of knowledge delivered by autobiographical writing unveils distinct qualities of knowledge work contingent to the personal (chapter two); how autobiography (the story of one’s life) and work (the production of knowledge) come to coincide in a practice of architecture that becomes autotheoretical (chapter three); and how such processes can be demonstrated through my own attempts at autotheoretical architectural work by bridging personal and professional experiences (chapter four).
The thesis is a collection of thoughts that, with different degrees of depth, focus and awareness, speak about the relationship between knowledge, work, architecture and life, proposing research and critical reflection processes that embrace, rather than exclude, the context of life as the inconsistent series of small and big events that characterise our daily endeavours and that, over time, shape our identity, in an indistinguishable tie between what we do and what we are.
The thesis attempts to tell a possible story about the need to root architectural knowledge and design in more explicitly personal processes of reflection, arguing that the attention to the personal and to personal knowledge, is not a fashionable, passing phenomenon, but indicates a paradigm shift propelled by the desire to overcome the increasing detachment and discontentment that culminated at the end of the nineteenth century, between knowledge and personal life
Medical Characterisation of Mental Illness as a Risk Management Tool in a Postmodern Society
No full textThis critical reflection endeavours to discuss why science’s monopolisation of mental health understanding and categorisation is illogical within a postmodern society. I will consider how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has become a risk management tool and how psychiatry itself is a failed attempt at paradigmatically fulfilling modernity’s aspiration of objective scientific knowledge and truth (Lewis, 2000:72).</p
Understanding urban trends while adopting rural development as a strategy to achieve urban sustainability in Nigeria
No full textUrban areas are already home to 55% of the world’s population with this figure expected to grow to 70% by 2050 which is in a span of a few years. Urbanization is seen as an essential force to the global efforts to build back better, and the World Cities Report 2020 confirms that cities remain central to the achievement of sustainable development. However, the speed of the urbanisation trends requires urgent and adequate sustainability measures in place. This is because the increasing trend without sustainability plans will create an overwhelming challenge that will override its transformative role in cities and negate the chances of it becoming advantageous to transition to sustainable development. While some scholars reveal that urban population growth is an important driving force to the rapid urban trends and urban expansion; others maintained that migration is a major driving force to global urban population growth. Importantly, it was noted that internal rural urban migration is the central cause of increasing urban trends in many developing countries. Strikingly, studies demonstrate that rural urban migrant congregate in urban areas in search of economic opportunities and a better life. It in effect shows that the increasing rural urban migration which causes increased urban trends is mostly a consequent of lack of economic opportunities and better life in the rural areas. This constitutes significant challenges in the urban centres and one of the most pressing of these challenges is identified as how to achieve urban sustainability. To achieve urban sustainability per se requires planning, management, and financing. The World Cities Report 2020 strongly affirms that adequately planned, managed, and financed cities creates economic, social, environmental values such that can vastly improve the quality of life of all. It can be argued that this planning includes making every effort not to neglect rural development as focusing on urban development alone is a costly negligence. Essentially, the rural development should gear towards providing quality of life and economic opportunities to the rural residents, without this, rural urban migration which results in unprecedented urbanisation will continue in the future. This will create more devastating challenges, making it more difficult to achieve urban sustainability. Based on this, the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations in the 2021 World Social Report calls for action towards embarking on rural development to end the rural urban migration resulting from rural urban inequality. Moreover, sustainable rural development is considered in the SDGs as vital to the economic, social and environmental viability of nations. Accordingly, this paper focuses on understanding the trends of urbanisation while adopting rural development as an approach to achieve urban sustainability. The paper will draw from a wide range of 237 literature reviews and adopt a qualitative focus group discussions to ascertain the importance of rural development to urban sustainability.</p
Facilities Management its Effect on Social Sustainability: The Context of South African Higher Education Institution
No full textFacilities Management (FM) has a significant role in promoting social sustainability. This study aimed to investigate the impact of FM on social sustainability in a South African Higher Education Institution, specifically Nelson Mandela University (NMU). The study employed an exploratory research design and a qualitative approach, gathering data from observations of three lecture theatres and semi-structured interviews with key personnel from the institution's Estate and Facility Management unit using a purposive sample. The findings highlight the importance of FM in creating a learning environment, reinforcing its role as a strategic enabler of the institution's academic mission. The study also reveals that effective FM, as defined by robust maintenance strategies, user involvement, and integrating physical and digital infrastructures, significantly contributes to the institution's social sustainability. The study emphasises the importance of ongoing dialogue and research in this evolving field, as FM's role in promoting social sustainability in higher education becomes more important. The findings suggest that a strategic and integrated approach to FM can improve social Sustainability in HEIs, providing valuable insights for similar institutions worldwide.</p
Assessing Energy Performance of HVAC Systems within a Railway Infrastructure Environment
No full textWith the rapid development of railway transport in the UK over the last decade, energy consumption and carbon emission from heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems within a railway infrastructure environment has surged massively. This is fundamentally due to large floor areas, operation times, increased occupation and quality of services and plant equipment. Existing research on this topic focuses mainly on the integration of a single HVAC system for a chosen station. However, due to the complex configuration of a rail infrastructure environment, it is crucial to investigate how different HVAC systems perform within specific rooms, with a special focus on critical spaces within the station. This paper therefore aimed to evaluate the dedicated HVAC systems in association with emerging technologies and sustainable strategies that can be applied to specific spaces (including Retails and critical spaces such as Stations Operations Room, Comms Equipment Room, and Electrical Switch Room) within a station building in Manchester (UK). A key focus of the paper was to analyse and compare the energy efficiency of different types of the selected plant and assess the achievable energy saving due to the type of HVAC systems that was utilised for a specific space within the environment. Based on the results, it was found that Air Handling Unit (AHU) supplied by air source heat pump (ASHP) being configured for the regularly occupied spaces such as retails can implement energy efficiency, while the presence of south-facing window could lead to a significant increase of thermal loads for such spaces. It was also found that ASHP configured with Close Control Units (CCU) can be an energy efficient HVAC solution for both the Stations Operations Room and the Comms Equipment Room, while a Direct Expansion (DX) cooling system with outdoor condenser unit can achieve energy efficiency for the Electrical Switch Room.</p