From afar, the chromatically-arranged products, interspersed with packaging pinwheels and action figures, bring to mind a map of a micro-urban sprawl.
Few might realise as they watch the semi-final of the UEFA European Championship that the Stade Vélodrome stadium has micro urban wind turbines or that the venue, which is the largest club football ground in France, recovers heat from a nearby wastewater treatment plant.
On the other hand, distributed small scale NSF-CAES can gather electricity, gas, heat, and other resources together to construct a micro energy internet in urban and rural communities, industrial park, factories, schools, and other places.
This research aims at understanding the relation between urban policies and socioeconomic division on a micro level by investigating how broad urban policies are reflected on a certain part of the city leading to its division.
Graduate engineers we have recently recruited at Dyson worked on designs including an energy efficient water boiler, a portable solar charger, a micro wind turbine suitable for urban areas, biodegradable cutlery, recycled composites and waste-free disposable nappies.
In this article the most fundamental decomposition-based optimization method - block coordinate search, based on the sequential decomposition of problems in subproblems - and building performance simulation programs are used for reasoning about a building design process at micro-urban scale and defining strategies for making the search more efficient.
Thermal remote sensing products such as thermal images captured by the Landsat-5 Thermal Mapper (L5-TM) (NASA 2013) instrument have been used to study areas of higher relative temperatures within a city, also known as micro-urban heat islands (Johnson 2009).
However, this sensor records thermal emission at a spatial resolution (1 km) too coarse for micro-urban heat island investigations.
A study by Aniello et al. (1995) compared the spatial distribution of micro-urban heat islands and tree cover in Dallas, Texas, using L5-TM and geographic information systems (GIS).
