Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
Time shift: The peak reduction potential of demand response with simple time-of-use pricing
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
Increasing electrification of energy systems, required for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, poses challenges for electricity systems from increased peak demand. Demand response can reduce peak demand, but acceptability is limited by consumer concerns about effort, complexity, and lack of control. This study assesses the potential of simple demand response programs using existing electricity [...]
Peak loads, health, and energy equality: The effects of demand-side electricity efficiency interventions
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
Electrification is key for climate change mitigation but, if unmanaged, risks increasing energy poverty, inequalities, and peak electricity demand. While demand response to reduce peak electricity demand has been the subject of extensive research, the effects of energy efficiency interventions for wider health system and socioeconomic outcomes are less studied. This study assesses the impact of [...]
Peak demand, consumer costs, and socioeconomic effects: Considerations for distributed generation and energy storage
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Engineering, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sustainability
Electrification is a key approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions but will increase peak demand, challenging electricity systems. Distributed generation (DG) from solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and battery storage are often offered as potential solutions. This study uses a previously validated agent-based model of residential electricity demand to assess the impact of solar DG on peak [...]
Carbon-negative nickel mining to meet global mineral resource demands
Published: 2025-05-10
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
CO2-Enhanced Mineral Recovery (CO2-EMR) is a deep in situ mining technology that utilizes an engineered CO2 leaching fluid to extract nickel (Ni) and cobalt (Co) from subsurface ultramafic rocks, while simultaneously permanently mineralizing CO2 as carbonate minerals. This carbon negative process can contribute to meeting the mineral demands of current and emerging energy technologies. We [...]
Marine Geohazards and Geo-Engineering Constraints on the Glaciated European Margins
Published: 2025-05-05
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The glaciated European continental margins (spanning 49-82°N and 16°W-36°E) are home to a thriving offshore energy sector and densely inhabited coastal areas. These regions face numerous marine geohazards and geo-engineering challenges due to complex subsurface conditions shaped by large-scale geological and climate processes. The geological complexity of this area is among the highest globally, [...]
GeoAI-based Urban Environmental Forecasting: A Remote Sensing Driven Hybrid Deep Learning and Machine Learning Framework
Published: 2025-05-03
Subjects: Education, Engineering
This study presents a hybrid GeoAI forecasting framework for long-term environmental monitoring in Dhaka, Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated and environmentally degraded megacities in the Global South. Using a 25-year record (2000–2024) of multi-source satellite and climate data, we modeled monthly trends in five key variables: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Bare Soil [...]
Protection of subterranean water infrastructure in an abrupt sunlight reduction scenario
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
An abrupt sunlight reduction scenario (ASRS) could result from a nuclear war, supervolcanic eruption, or asteroid/comet impact, reducing global temperatures for over a decade and leaving subterranean water pipes vulnerable to freezing. This paper builds on previous work assessing the extent of vulnerable water pipes in a severe ASRS, and assesses the feasibility of two methods of pipe protection: [...]
Reliability of Contrast-Based Automated Fracture Detection from Decimeter Resolution Aerial Imagery
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geology, Geotechnical Engineering, Other Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Tectonics and Structure
Aerial imagery that captures outcrop exposures of rocks enables the characterization of structural discontinuities such as faults and fractures across large and difficult-to-access areas. These datasets provide an opportunity to analyze the characteristics of fault and fracture networks as analogues for the subsurface. The application of automated interpretation methods to imagery has the [...]
Comparative analysis of the stage-discharge rating operated in gradual varied flows with alternative streamflow monitoring approaches
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Streamflow data derived from stage-discharge (HQRC) are reported without uncertainty compelling users to treat them as absolute and deterministic. However, ignoring uncertainty is no longer viable, as data users increasingly demand confidence in measurements - especially for cross-agency comparisons and scientific or legal scrutiny. This paper investigates a major factor affecting the accuracy of [...]
Pathways to Carbon Neutrality: A Review of CO2 Reduction Strategies
Published: 2025-04-29
Subjects: Engineering
The global climate crisis, driven largely by the escalating levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, has prompted an urgent need for effective mitigation strategies. CO2, the predominant greenhouse gas, is primarily released through fossil fuel combustion, industrial processes, and deforestation. Its continuous accumulation in the atmosphere has led to severe climate disruptions, including [...]
Streamflow Hysteresis Analysis through a Deep Dive Budget of the St Venant Momentum Terms
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Hysteretic conditions entail non-unique time-independent relationships in flow variables and are prevalent in the unsteady flow regime of most rivers worldwide. Estimation errors associated with the inability of current monitoring techniques to resolve hysteresis effects could have profound implications when the recorded data is used for water resources management and flood forecasting. A deep [...]
Back to Basics: On the Proper Determination of Free-Surface Slope (FSS) in Gradually Varied Open Channel Flows
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
This study is a fundamental evaluation of the fluvial wave propagation in river reaches affected by hysteresis, one of the most complex open-channel topics, materialized in loops and lags among hydraulic variables. Hysteresis processes are still understudied as measurements in natural streams for the whole wave propagation duration are hardly available, while the data from existing gaging sites [...]
An integrated approach for characterizing and selecting climate change scenarios: Focusing on variability and extremeness
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Engineering
This study presents a novel integrated approach for selecting optimal combinations of global climate models (GCMs) and shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) to assess the impact of climate change on the aquatic environment. The method proposed in this study considers the comprehensive spatial and temporal ranges of climate projections, specifically focusing on the variability and extremeness of [...]
Can large language models effectively reason about adverse weather conditions?
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Engineering
This paper seeks to answer the question “can Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively reason about adverse weather conditions?”. To address this question, we utilized multiple LLMs to harness the US National Weather Service (NWS) flood report data spanning from June 2005 to September 2024. Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformer (BART), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from [...]
Sustainable AI infrastructure: A scenario-based forecast of water footprint under uncertainty
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Engineering
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing is creating a significant but often overlooked impact on global water resources. This paper presents a global assessment of water consumption in AI-driven data centres, distinguishing between operational water use at the facility and at the electricity generation stage, and embodied water associated with hardware [...]