Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Engineering
Climate as the Primary Moderator: Towards Context-Driven Design and Implementation of Vertical Greenery Systems for Stormwater Management
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering
Urbanisation intensifies stormwater management challenges by expanding impervious surfaces, increasing flood risk and degrading water quality. Vertical Greenery Systems (VGS) are increasingly promoted as nature-based solutions for space-constrained cities, yet their performance remains highly variable and context-dependent. This systematic review, conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines [...]
On radiocarbon near the epicenter of the 1908 Tunguska event
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
This paper is a continuation of a series of works, devoted to various aspects of the 1908 Tunguska event. A large number of hypotheses about its causes have already been put forward. However, so far none of them has received convincing evidence. Since the late 1950s, a large number of studies have been carried out in the area of the Tunguska event, including those related to radiocarbon [...]
Scalable and robust Gaussian processes for reanalysis of urban air temperature with crowdsourced meteorological data
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Statistical Models
Crowdsourced air temperature data from networks like Weather Underground offer dense spatial coverage and are increasingly used to study the canopy urban heat island (CUHI) effect. However, these observations are noisy: siting conditions, environmental interference, and sensor failures introduce spatially and temporally varying bias. This complicates interpolation, limiting our ability to [...]
From Interface Dynamics to Darcy Scale Description of Multiphase Flow in Porous Media
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
An outstanding characteristic of porous media, desired in many applications, is the large surface area, which facilitates solid-fluid interactions, making porous media an extreme case in colloid and interface science. In two-fluid systems, wetting and the balance of capillary and viscous forces control fluid displacement processes, leading to a wide range of complex flow regimes with rich [...]
Cropland expansion in a nuclear winter with loss of industry
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
A nuclear war has the potential to cause an abrupt-sunlight-reduction scenario and the collapse of electricity/industry, disrupting food production and distribution worldwide and creating widespread food insecurity. In this work, we explore the potential of using animal draught as a power source to cultivate current cropland and expand cropland area during a nuclear winter with loss of industry. [...]
Fines-Induced Shear Band Thickening in Gap-Graded Soils: Evidence from Digital Image and Volume Correlations
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Engineering
Shear band thickness is a critical parameter governing strain localisation and post-peak strength degradation in granular soils. However, its relationship with fines content and the consistency between surface- and volume-based measurement techniques remain insufficiently understood. This study investigates the evolution and residual thickness of shear bands in gap-graded sands with fines [...]
Smart Urban Design with Physics-Informed Neural Networks: Quantifying Temperature Reductions from Green Infrastructure Using Satellite Thermal Data
Published: 2025-10-19
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering
Urban Heat Islands (UHIs), characterised by elevated temperatures in densely built environments, pose critical challenges to urban sustainability, public health, and energy resilience. Mitigating UHIs requires precise quantification of the cooling effects of green infrastructure; however, existing models often fail to integrate high-resolution geospatial data with physical laws. This study [...]
Seismic response analysis of corrugated steel wall under Earth load - Seismic Fault area far and near
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Engineering
Abstract This study examines the seismic response of corrugated steel shear walls under land load-seismic seismic distant and near fault zone. Corrugated steel shear walls are used as an efficient lateral resistance system in earthquake-resistant structures due to their formability and high energy dissipation capacity. The use of corrugated steel sheets has several benefits, including increased [...]
Vector Graphics-Based Geospatial Contour Maps: A Web-Native Interactive Approach for Modern Geospatial Data Science Applications
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Computer Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces
Visualizing scalar fields (e.g., temperature, precipitation etc.) on the web is often done via pre‑rendered raster tiles. While simple to serve and fast to access, rasters limit interactivity (feature picking, dynamic styling) and typically require heavy pre‑generation pipelines. Raster tiles remain the dominant method for web-based scalar field visualization, but they are storage-heavy and [...]
Variational numerical-modelling strategies for the simulation of driven free-surface waves
Published: 2025-10-11
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
A new tool is developed for simulating three-dimensional (3D) water-wave motion using the first fully variational 3D discretisation in space and time of Luke's variational principle (VP), with additional focus on the formation and analysis of extreme waves generated within in-house experimental wavetanks. The resulting ``numerical wavetank'' is able to emulate laboratory sea states in which [...]
Biomineralisation for Sustainable Ecotoxic Metal Immobilisation via Enzyme Induced Carbonate Precipitation
Published: 2025-10-01
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Heavy metal contamination of water presents a critical global challenge driven by the persistence and toxicity of elements such as arsenic, cadmium and lead. Conventional remediation strategies, such as Enzyme-Induced Carbonate Precipitation (EICP), typically rely on commercial urease and a multi-step extraction process, which increases energy demand, generates ammonium byproducts, and requires [...]
The African Transport Systems Database: an open geospatial database of multi-modal connected networks
Published: 2025-09-29
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Transportation Engineering
We present the first comprehensive geolocated multi-modal transport database for the whole continent of Africa, the African Transport Systems Database (AfTS-Db), including road, rail, aviation, maritime and inland waterway networks. To do so, we created and standardized asset and network data across all transport modes, including inter-modal connections, attributes of road and rail corridors and [...]
A Sensitivity Analysis Approach to Identifying Drivers of Streamflow Hysteresis
Published: 2025-09-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering
We study the critical interplay between streamflow hysteresis and local hydro-morphologic conditions. Hysteresis strength, which can lead to over 60% errors in discharge estimation with widely accepted monitoring methods, is primarily influenced by local characteristics such as bed slope, roughness, and event wave intensity. Our study used a 1D numerical model to highlight the hysteresis response [...]
A Critical Review of Nature-Based Solutions for Enhancing Climate Resilience and Water Security in Mountain Ecosystems
Published: 2025-09-23
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Other Civil and Environmental Engineering
Mountain ecosystems, functioning as indispensable "water towers," face escalating threats from climate change, land degradation, and water insecurity, jeopardizing the livelihoods of downstream populations. This paper presents a comprehensive critical review of integrated strategies designed to enhance the resilience of these vital socio-ecological systems. It synthesizes the theoretical [...]
Minkowski Functionals as Analytical Predictors of Permeability in Porous Microstructures
Published: 2025-09-19
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
Understanding the relationship between microstructure and macroscopic properties in porous media remains crucial for numerous applications in geoscience and engineering. For example, accurate predictability of permeability is essential for optimizing fluid flow processes in applications such as hydrocarbon recovery, groundwater management, and carbon or energy storage. The Kozeny-Carman equation [...]