Related papers: Inflatable Evergreen Polar Zone Dome (EPZD) Settle…
In a series of previous articles (see references) the author offered to cover a city or other important large installations or subregions by a transparent thin film supported by a small additional air overpressure under the form of an AB…
The TRAPPIST-1 system provides an extraordinary opportunity to study multiple terrestrial extrasolar planets and their atmospheres. Here we use the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Atmosphere Model version 4 to study the…
Rising water demands and depleting freshwater resources have brought desalination and wastewater treatment technologies to the forefront. For sustainable water management, there is a global push towards Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) with the…
The poor thermal insulating building windows, especially single pane windows, are wasting ~7% of the total energy consumed by the U.S. every year. This paper presents an electrostatic force suspended polymer-air multilayer (EPAM) structure…
Over 4 billion years ago, Earth is thought to have been a hazy world akin to Saturn's moon Titan. The organic hazes in the atmosphere at this time could contain a vast inventory of life's building blocks, and thus may have seeded warm…
The stability of Earth's climate on geological timescales is enabled by the carbon-silicate cycle that acts as a negative feedback mechanism stabilizing surface temperatures via the intake and outgas of atmospheric carbon. On Earth, this…
Zero Emission Neighborhoods (ZEN) is a concept studied in Norway to reduce the CO_2 emission of neighborhoods. One question coming along this concept is how to design the energy system of such neighborhoods to fit the ZEN definition. From…
With the press of global climate change, extreme weather and sudden weather changes are becoming increasingly common. To maintain a comfortable indoor environment and minimize the contribution of the building to climate change as much as…
A large-area thermoelectric generator (TEG) utilizing a folded thin-film concept is implemented and the performance evaluated for near room temperature applications having modest temperature gradients (< 50 K). The TEGs with the area of…
Eccentric planets may spend a significant portion of their orbits at large distances from their host stars, where low temperatures can cause atmospheric CO2 to condense out onto the surface, similar to the polar ice caps on Mars. The…
The habitable zone (HZ) is the circular region around a star(s) where standing bodies of water could exist on the surface of a rocky planet. Space missions employ the HZ to select promising targets for follow-up habitability assessment. The…
The aim of my dissertation is to investigate habitability in extra-Solar Systems. Most of the time, only planets are considered as possible places where extraterrestrial life can emerge and evolve, however, their moons could be inhabited,…
The biologically damaging solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation (quantified by the DNA-weighted dose) reaches the Martian surface in extremely high levels. Searching for potentially habitable UV-protected environments on Mars, we considered the…
Thermodynamic theory is developed for the ferroelectric phase transition of an ultrathin film in equilibrium with a chemical environment that supplies ionic species to compensate its surface. Equations of state and free energy expressions…
In the conventional habitable zone (HZ) concept, a CO$_{2}$-H$_2$O greenhouse maintains surface liquid water. Through the water-mediated carbonate-silicate weathering cycle, atmospheric CO$_{2}$ partial pressure (pCO$_{2}$) responds to…
The habitable zone concept is important because it focuses the scientific search for extraterrestrial life and aids the planning of future telescopes. Recent work has shown that planets near the outer edge of the habitable zone might not…
Previous attempts to describe circumbinary habitable zones have been concerned with the spatial extent of the zone, calculated analytically according to the combined radiation field of both stars. By contrast to these "spatial HZs", we…
The discovery of many planets using the Kepler telescope includes ten planets orbiting eight binary stars. Three binaries, Kepler-16, Kepler-47, and Kepler-453, have at least one planet in the circumbinary habitable-zone (BHZ). We constrain…
The concept of a system-wide measure of the sustainment of life (habitability) for space-faring interplanetary species is introduced and explored. Although largely agnostic to the details of how interplanetary life might operate (e.g., via…
Thermal metamaterial represents a groundbreaking approach to control heat conduction, and, as a crucial component, thermal invisibility is of utmost importance for heat management. Despite the flourishing development of thermal invisibility…