Airtightness in the Retrofit of Historic Buildings: Investigation of a retrofit strategy for historic traditional buildings, optimizing their energy-efficiency, indoor environment quality, and heritage preservation

Despite being a critical aspect in improving the building stock’s environmental performance and achieving the global environmental goals, the retrofit of traditional historic buildings is hindered by a lack of comprehensive guidelines tailored to their complex building physics and heritage preservation requirements. The conventional retrofit...

Optical Filter Coated PV Cell for Noise-free Outdoor LiFi

In today’s society, the need for alternate high-speed data transmission solutions has increased due to the radio frequency (RF) spectrum’s growing congestion. Visible Light Communication (VLC)-based LiFi has emerged as a possible alternative to current wireless technologies like WiFi. The difficulty, though, is that the photodiode performance as...

Investigating Data Collection and Reporting Practices of Human Annotations in Societally Impactful Machine Learning Applications: A Systematic Review of Top-Cited IEEE Access Papers

This systematic review investigates the practices and implications of human annotations in machine learning (ML) research. Analyzing a selection of 100 papers from the IEEE Access Journal, the study explores the data collection and reporting methods employed. The findings reveal a prevalent lack of standardization and formalization in the...

The House is Never Complete: A Cartography of Idiosyncrasy in Socio-political Maelstrom

This research and drawings focus on the recent post-Soviet history of Tbilisi, Georgia and the production of architectural and urban interventions as they coincide with larger political processes (i.e. the collapse of the Soviet Union, the shift to neoliberal economic policies, etc.) and social phenomena (i.e. production of ethno-nationalist...

The industrial pedagogical Technicum: A Vernacular Appropriation of Modernism

The Industrial Pedagogical Technicum, completed in 1978, has developed a curious status among the large-scale construction projects of the Late-Soviet period in Georgia. The dimensions of curiosity result from the fact that, until 2017, the architect was unknown to most local architects and historians, and that there are few and inconsistent...

Texturing approaches for the fabrication of nc-Si:H/c-Si tandem devices

This thesis is dedicated to the fabrication of a novel silicon based tandem cell which combines hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si:H) thin film(TF) photovoltaic (PV) technology and silicon heterojunction (SHJ) c-Si based PV technology. As a matter of fact, the growth of nc-Si:H on a flat c-Si substrate is not uniformas it irregularly...

Coupled CFD and CSM Simualtion of a Plate Fin Heat Exchanger: Determination of local and global effects due to dynamic operation

Heat exchangers of any kind are exposed to thermal loading which have the potential to cause severe stresses on the equipment. The magnitude of these loads are far more pronounced when temperature differences occur. These may be during plant start-up or shut-down due to the transient nature of the temperature profiles or even imbalances that...