In performance-based design, simple calculation method to evaluate the safety from smoke is useful and valuable, not only because designers could perform safety planning by themselves but also officers could confirm the plan easily. However, it cannot be said that a rational simple method exists for the safety verification of fire rooms with smoke extraction system, though the simple method for fire rooms without smoke extraction has already been widely used. This paper proposes a simple calculation method to evaluate the safety from smoke in a fire room with mechanical smoke extraction system. In this method, the evacuation time and smoke filling time are compared and the required smoke extraction rate can be obtained in order to prevent smoke layer from filling down to the critical height for safety. This simple method is validated to be used for actual planning by detailed study.

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Stiffness assumptions affect even a simple incremental analysis and moreover a buckling or 3D elasto-plastic analysis. The Trial Stiffness Selection (TSS) method, that was proposed by the authors and enables a large deformation elasto-plastic analysis of a large 3D frame using stress-strain curves, is newly extended to analyze high temperature collapse of a steel frame. Using the proposed TSS-Thermal (TSST) method, collapse of a tube structure under elevated temperature is analyzed successfully. In thc case with a wide hole on the tube, columns show plasticity in the early stage beside the hole and redistribute their axial forces.

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The purpose of this paper is to clarify the difference in the resident's consciousness and life style which affects the increases of energy consumption in summer and winter in houses in and around Kyoto city. Energy consumption, resident's consciousness and life style were investigated. The results were as follows: 1. Energy consumption of the investigated houses is 49.3G.T/year. Resident's consciousness affect the seasonal increase in energy consumption. 1. Resident's consciousness has influenced energy conservation. The resident is doing energy conservation, doing devising a life style. 1. The group whose increase of energy consumption were low in summer refrained from air conditioning and utilize ventilation positively. The group whose increase of energy consumption were low in winter refrained from heating and clothed thickly. These groups are doing much more devices in their life.

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In this paper, the transmission characteristics of the spits excelled through coughing are examined in a calm environment. Three subject experiments were performed, and it shows that there are about 6.7mg spits expelled at a high speed up to 22m/s when coughing, and the spits can arrive further than 2m. Then the transmitting processes of the coughed spits of different diameters were analyzed using Lagrangian Equation. The results show that coughed spit's transmission process will be greatly influenced by the indoor airflow, and its transmission characteristics will change with its increase in size. The soils less than 30μm will be spread to the whole room by the airflow's movement, the spits between 50μm〜200μm will fall by gravity, and the spits greater than 300μm will become difficult to fall because of inertia. Moreover, it indicates that the couched spits probably cause droplet infection in close contacts of patients of infectious respiratory diseases.

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The method for controlling room air temperature based on the concept of contribution ratio of indoor climate(CRI) is developed. In this paper, we show the equations which are newly proposed to predict room air temperature by means of CRI with limited number of the temperature sensors. The accuracy of the method is examined by comparing the prediction with the coupled simulation of CFD and radiation. The present prediction method only considers convective heat transfer and does not deal with the radiative heat transfer. The method takes into account the radiative heat transfer implicitly and works well.

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This paper describes evaluation on energy conservation, environmental protection and economical aspect through long-term operating results of air conditioning with an energy pile system, which was applied to pile foundations of an actual building, for the purpose of the cost reduction of an underground heat exchanger. First, as a result of measuring space cooling systems, energy efficiency ratio of a direct cooling operation and coefficient of performance of a heat pump were 18.6 and 3.9, respectively. Second, it was clarified that the energy pile system could be utilized over a long period of time by monitoring long-term fluctuation and characteristics of the system performance and earth temperature. In addition, we carried out evaluation on annual energy balance of the energy pile system and comparison with conventional air conditioning systems. The reduction rate of the primary energy and CO_2 emissions to a typical air conditioning system reached 31.0% and 33.2%, respectively.

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A numerical model for the simulation of the thermal processes inside the urban canopy layer is proposed. The model is coupled with a turbulence closure model for the atmospheric boundary layer with the purpose of analyzing the thermal effects of urban areas. In the model, the buildings and land uses inside each computational grid mesh are averaged by a lumping space-averaging method. Then, a model for the evaluation of momentum loss and heat exchange between the air and the urban canopy is developed. This model accounts for all processes which can generate heat inside the canopy layer such as the heating of wall, roof and the ground surface, the conduction of heat to buildings through windows, wall and roof, and the discharge of artificial heat due to air conditioners. The coupled numerical model was applied for the analysis of heating characteristics of a housing area and an office area and the influence of a housing area on the thermal climate of surrounding vegetative areas.

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The authors performed the questionnaire survey based on the conjoint analysis in order to clarify the monetary value of the environmental performance of the detached house. The cost, locational condition, household goods and environmental performance are considered as the attributes, which affect the utility of detached house. The environmental performance is represented by the amount of the energy consumption cuts by the usage of the solar collector or the photovoltaic system. From these investigations, the monetary value of the reduction of the energy consumption based on the MWTP is higher than the market price of the both solar collector and the photovoltaic system. In addition, the MWTP of the all attributes of the house depends on the economic situation of the respondents. This tendency is most remarkable in the MWTP of the environmental performance.

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Heat island phenomena in Tokyo metropolitan area has spread more and more widely. The characteristics of this heat island phenomena are different for each regional area. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the atmospheric heat balance in more detail for each regional area. In this paper, the authors have simulated urban scale climate for Tokyo metropolitan area in summer, and compared the regional characteristic of atmospheric heat balance at the center of Tokyo, the southern part of Saitama, and Ichihara city, based on an "Urban Heat Balance Model". From the results of simulation and observation data, the sea breeze has great impacts on the climate at the center of Tokyo. The effect of sea breeze on the southern part of Saittama is not strong. At Ichihara city, the wind from windward side has some affect on the climate of this area. Additionally, the authors tried to classify the regional characteristic of air temperature by average temperature and diurnal range.

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This paper presents the result of an experiment of composting garbage by small multi-cell composting tank for garbage using natural ventilation. The composting tank can be controlled without electric power. In this experiment, 1kg of garbage was composted daily during a winter season and the followings were measured : temperature, disposal weight, percentage of water content, draft quantity and odor. Temperature and percentage of water content were suitable for composting. Draft quantity was well-supplied by gravitational ventilation. 70% of the garbage in weight was disposed of and emitted odor intensity was at a low level.

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Followings are the results of this research, 1) 72.0% of the people answered that water quality in Onga River is "relatively dirty" or "dirty". 2) 70.4% of the whole region worried about quality of water supply cause of the aggravation of the water quality in Onga River. And people worried more about water quality in lower basin region (79.2%) and rather more about ecology in upper basin region (25.1%). 3) As reasons for aggravation of the water quality 76.3% of the whole region pointed the drainage from the human life. 4) Improvement of the water quality in BOD from 5.0mg/L to 1.0mg/L was contingent-valued as 10,150 yen to each answerer. 5) 59.0% of the answerers require providing the water facilities integrated in the whole river basin region. Water facilities should be provided after the sphere of river basin region considering the natural circulatory system.

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Aiming at possible application to detection of several kinds of architectural objects such as windows from two-dimensional digital images, this paper proposes an efficient algorithm for detecting rectangular components in a binary edge image by limiting target objects to those having so-called slicing structure. The proposed algorithm first identifies the regions where ractangular objects may exist by projecting the image intensity data to two axes. It then further narrows the set of candidate edges that are supposed to form a part of rectangles by applying an efficient dynamic programming algorithm. It has been demonstrated through computational experiments that our algorithm attains much higher efficiency and detection accuracy compared with an existing method.

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A multi agent simulation model to deal how the Human-Environment-Society System can approach the sustainable society was established. The model expresses dynamic process where three agents, a government, enterprises and consumers play interdependently through a variety of economic activities. Every enterprise and consumer has respective value systems that are both defined by price and environmental load. Each enterprise is imposed to determine how weighty between price and environmental load when she produces goods in order to maximize her profit. While each consumer also determines how weighty between price and environmental load when he buy products in order to maximize his utility. These determination processes are described as learning systems on an individual agent based on Finite State Machine, FSM and Genetic Algorism, GA. As a whole, the model can display a various paths whether the society goes to the sustainable world or the materialism world. The built model was verified qualitatively, and numerical simulations were presented.

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The Act concerning the support for reconstructing livelihoods of disaster victims was revised in April, 2004. Since the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, the balance between self effort, mutual cooperation and public aid for disaster victims who lost their residences has been discussed. Public aid is welcomed by disaster victims but it has a budgetary limitation. This research aims to verify how much public aid was provided for one house-lost victim after the Kobe Earthquake. Typical models of public aid for house-lost victims after the Kobe Earthquake were constructed according to the victim's housing recovery option and his income level.

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Recently, some seismic risk management measures are utilized reflecting the quantitative and qualitative assessment of seismic risk. These measures are categorized into risk control and risk financing ; the former is essential to mitigate seismic risk and the latter is effective to cover the unexpected loss caused by unforeseeable and complicated seismic events. In this paper, a seismic risk swap using a parametric trigger is employed as a risk financing measure. Portfolios consisting of 50 facilities in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka are employed in order to examine the feasibility of seismic risk swap assuming that the exchanged annual expected losses are identical. Through the examination, it is also proposed the procedure to determine the parameters used in parametric trigger based risk swap, from the viewpoint of reduction in probabilistic maximum loss.

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