Search Results (87)

With the promotion of national fitness, the requirements for regulating indoor environments during non-competition periods are low and relatively flexible under the trend of composite sports buildings. To maximize the use of natural ventilation and lighting for energy savings, passive optimization design based on building ontology has emerged as an effective strategy. This paper focuses on the spatial prototype of large- and medium-sized gymnasiums, optimizing key geometric design parameters and envelope structure parameters that influence energy consumption. This optimization employs a combination of orthogonal experiments and performance simulations. This study identifies the degree to which each factor affects energy consumption in the competition hall and determines the optimal low-energy consumption gymnasium prototype. The results reveal that the skylight area ratio is the most significant factor impacting the energy consumption of large- and medium-sized gymnasiums. The optimized gymnasium prototype reduced energy consumption by 5.3%~50.9% compared to all experimental combinations. This study provides valuable references and insights for architects during the initial stages of designing sports buildings to achieve low energy consumption. Full article

Objective: The present study investigated the relationship between protein and amino acid supplementation and various associated aspects among recreational gym goers at 2 gymnasiums in Oradea (Romania). Methods: A total of 165 gym goers (110 men and 55 women, most of them 18–30 years old) with high educational levels were included in the present study, which was conducted as face-to-face interviews. Results: Participants were divided into 4 groups: protein supplement users (PSUs, 42/165), creatine supplement users (CSUs, 38/165), L-carnitine supplement users (LcSUs, 37/165), and protein + creatine + L-carnitine supplement users (PCLcSUs, 48/165). Most consumers were young (18–30 years) and preferred the triple combination. Females consumed PS and CS (38.2% and 34.5%, respectively), while the most-used NSs by males were PCLcS (36.4%) and LcS (27.3%). Obese gym goers opted for LcS consumption (r = 0.999, p < 0.05). Creatine and L-carnitine were consumed for force training (65.79 and 62.16%), while PCLcS and PS were used in cardio + force and force training in equal measures (42.86 and 47.92%, respectively). Most PSUs were gym goers for 7–12 months and more than 1 year (r = 0.999 and r = 0.952, respectively, p < 0.05), while PCLcSUs had a training frequency of at least 5 times a week (r = 0.968, p < 0.05). Muscle mass growth was the primary training focus for all NS users (57.89%), followed by muscular tonus (40.54%, p < 0.05). Almost 30% of one-only NS users reported various side effects, whereas all PCLcSUs claimed side effects (p < 0.05). Conclusions: Age and gender were key factors in diet type, training type, frequency, duration, scope, NS type, and dose intake. The frequency of side effects substantially depended on the kind of NS and the dose consumed. The present study’s results highlight the need for health professionals’ advice and monitoring in personalized diets and protein and amino acid supplementation in recreational gym goers. Full article

Many existing structures require retrofitting and reinforcement due to aging and damage. The stability of the retrofitted structure is key to the retrofitting scheme, while construction safety during the retrofitting process is another crucial consideration. This study proposed an evaluation method for assessing the stability and construction process of steel structure retrofitting projects based on an ANSYS finite element analysis. By establishing a nonlinear finite element model of a retrofitted gymnasium roof truss structure, the overall stability of the system was systematically verified. The dynamic simulation of demolition and retrofitting procedures was conducted using the birth-and-death element technique, and a comprehensive safety assessment framework covering the entire construction process was developed. The case analysis demonstrated that this method can simulate the redistribution of internal forces during component demolition and identify potential risks. The effectiveness of the retrofitting strategy was evaluated by comparing the nonlinear stability coefficients of the structure before and after retrofitting, indicating improved performance within the scope of the finite element model. The research results demonstrated the feasibility of incorporating modeling, simulation, and assessment in retrofitting projects and provided a reference for similar retrofitting projects. Full article

In recent years, China has continuously increased the construction of sports facilities, with the number and area of sports venues steadily growing. The use of more energy-efficient ventilation methods in gymnasiums has become one of the research hotspots. Taking a multi-functional gymnasium in Wuhan as an example, the gymnasium adopts a seat air supply device driven by natural wind to enhance indoor ventilation. This study uses the methods of field measurement and CFD simulation to analyze the application effect of this new type of natural ventilation device in hot summer and warm winter areas during the transition season. Through CFD simulation of the ventilation performance of the seat air supply at different opening rates, the indoor ventilation effect and thermal comfort were analyzed. The application of the seat air supply greatly improved the indoor environment and enhanced the comfort of personnel. After turning on the seat air supply, the maximum temperature difference between the indoors and outdoors increased from 1.7 °C to 3.4 °C, the natural air intake rate increased from approximately 50% to approximately 70%, the wind speed in the seat area significantly increased, the uniformity of the wind speed field in the movement area significantly increased, and the proportion of areas with low wind speed and no wind speed decreased to 9.6%. The proportion of areas with wind speeds ranging from 0.3 to 0.5 m/s increased from 8.8% to 33.0%. At 10:00 a.m., the temperature at the indoor station was relatively low. The opening of the seat air supply device reduced the PMV value of the front seats by an average of 0.39. When the indoor platform temperature reached the maximum value, the impact of equipment activation on the PMV index of the seat area was relatively small, with an average reduction of only 0.19. The research results show that the application of a natural wind-driven seat air supply in sports venues is very promising, providing a new idea for the energy-saving renovation of gymnasiums and effectively promoting the development of low-carbon undertakings. Full article

Navigating uneven, unstructured terrain with dynamic obstacles remains a challenge for autonomous mobile robots. This article introduces Dynamic Unstructured Environment (DUnE) for evaluating the performance of off-road navigation systems in simulation. DUnE is a versatile software framework that implements the Gymnasium reinforcement learning (RL) interface for ROS 2, incorporating unstructured Gazebo simulation environments and dynamic obstacle integration to advance off-road navigation research. The testbed automates key performance metric logging and provides semi-automated trajectory generation for dynamic obstacles including simulated human actors. It supports multiple robot platforms and five distinct unstructured environments, ranging from forests to rocky terrains. A baseline reinforcement learning agent demonstrates the framework’s effectiveness by performing pointgoal navigation with obstacle avoidance across various terrains. By providing an RL interface, dynamic obstacle integration, specialized navigation tasks, and comprehensive metric tracking, DUnE addresses significant gaps in existing simulation tools. Full article

Amid the advancements in computer-based chemical process modeling and simulation packages used in commercial applications aimed at accelerating chemical process design and analysis, there are still certain tasks in design optimization, such as distillation column internals design, that become bottlenecks due to inherent limitations in such software packages. This work demonstrates the use of soft actor-critic (SAC) reinforcement learning (RL) in automating the task of determining the optimal design of trayed multistage distillation columns. The design environment was created using the AspenPlus^® software (version 12, Aspen Technology Inc., Bedford, Massachusetts, USA) with its RadFrac module for the required rigorous modeling of the column internals. The RL computational work was achieved by developing a Python package that allows interfacing with AspenPlus^® and by implementing in OpenAI’s Gymnasium module (version 1.0.0, OpenAI Inc., San Francisco, California, USA) the learning space for the state and action variables. The results evidently show that (1) SAC RL works as an automation approach for the design of distillation column internals, (2) the reward scheme in the SAC model significantly affects SAC performance, (3) column diameter is a significant constraint in achieving column internals design specifications in flooding, and (4) SAC hyperparameters have varying effects on SAC performance. SAC RL can be implemented as a one-shot learning model that can significantly improve the design of multistage distillation column internals by automating the optimization process. Full article

This study proposes a novel approach to enhance the stability and performance of reinforcement learning (RL) in long-horizon tasks. Overestimation bias in value function estimation and high uncertainty within environments make it difficult to determine the optimal action. To address this, we improve the truncated quantile critics algorithm by managing uncertainty in robotic applications. Our dynamic method adjusts the discount factor based on policy entropy, allowing for fine-tuning that reflects the agent’s learning status. This enables the existing algorithm to learn stably even in scenarios with limited training data, ensuring more robust adaptation. By leveraging policy entropy loss, this approach effectively boosts confidence in predicting future rewards. Our experiments demonstrated an 11% increase in average evaluation return compared to traditional fixed-discount-factor approaches in the DeepMind Control Suite and Gymnasium robotics environments. This approach significantly enhances sample efficiency and adaptability in complex long-horizon tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of entropy-guided RL in navigating challenging and uncertain environments. Full article

As global populations grow and environmental constraints intensify, improving agricultural water management is essential for sustainable food production. Traditional irrigation methods often lack adaptability, leading to inefficient water use. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising solution for developing dynamic irrigation strategies that balance productivity and resource conservation. However, agricultural RL tasks are characterized by sparse actions—irrigation only when necessary—and delayed rewards realized at the end of the growing season. This study integrates RL with AquaCrop-OSPy simulations in the Gymnasium framework to develop adaptive irrigation policies for maize. We introduce a reward mechanism that penalizes incremental water usage while rewarding end-of-season yields, encouraging resource-efficient decisions. Using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, our RL-driven approach outperforms fixed-threshold irrigation strategies, reducing water use by 29% and increasing profitability by 9%. It achieves a water use efficiency of 76.76 kg/ha/mm, a 40% improvement over optimized soil moisture threshold methods. These findings highlight RL’s potential to address the challenges of sparse actions and delayed rewards in agricultural management, delivering significant environmental and economic benefits. Full article

Background: Health literacy (HL) is an important element of public health that is linked to health behavior in children and adolescents. This study aimed to investigate the structural validity and reliability of the HLS₁₉-Q12 in the adolescent population, to measure the general HL of adolescents, and to assess the relationship between adolescents’ HL and health behavior. Methods: This cross-sectional study involved 825 students aged 15–19 years attending Lithuanian gymnasiums. The participants completed an online survey that collected information on key sociodemographic, HL, and health behavior indicators. Factor analysis, Cronbach’s alpha, and McDonald’s omega were used to validate the Lithuanian version of the HLS₁₉-Q12. Health behavior indicators, including physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption, self-rated health, and body mass index (BMI), were measured. We used regression analyses to assess the associations. Results: The HLS₁₉-Q12 showed an acceptable reliability index (Cronbach’s α = 0.885, McDonald’s omega ω = 0.877) and adequate structural validity (comparative fit index  =  0.89, Tucker and Lewis’s index of fit  =  0.88, root mean square error of approximation  =  0.06). We found that 67.1% of the adolescents had excellent or sufficient HL, 27.7% had problematic HL, and 5.2% had inadequate HL. Compared with girls, boys had greater HL. HL was positively related to physical activity and self-rated health and negatively related to alcohol use and smoking. Conclusions: HLS₁₉-Q12 is a reliable and valid measure of HL among adolescents in upper grades; higher levels of HL have been found to result in better health behaviors. Full article

We present a novel approach to performing fitness approximation in genetic algorithms (GAs) using machine learning (ML) models, focusing on dynamic adaptation to the evolutionary state. We compare different methods for (1) switching between actual and approximate fitness, (2) sampling the population, and (3) weighting the samples. Experimental findings demonstrate significant improvement in evolutionary runtimes, with fitness scores that are either identical or slightly lower than those of the fully run GA—depending on the ratio of approximate-to-actual-fitness computation. Although we focus on evolutionary agents in Gymnasium (game) simulators—where fitness computation is costly—our approach is generic and can be easily applied to many different domains. Full article

The lighting design of large-space buildings in gymnasiums can impact the indoor luminous and thermal environment, resulting in an uneven light and thermal distribution. This paper investigates the luminous and thermal environment control strategies for high spaces in gymnasiums, by simulating the luminous and thermal environment under different lighting forms and establishing a comprehensive evaluation model. The results show that the weights of the indoor luminous environment, thermal environment, and comprehensive energy consumption change with season and time under different lighting forms, which provides a basis for developing a temporal–spatial partition control strategy. The temporal–spatial partition control strategy is proposed for summer and winter, including the shading angle control under the lighting forms of south-facing side windows, west-facing side windows, and top skylights. Under summer conditions, the south-facing side windows have no shading from 8:00 to 10:00 and 14:00 to 16:00, and the shading angle is 0° from 10:00 to 14:00; the west-facing side windows have no shading from 8:00 to 14:00, the shading angle is 0° from 14:00 to 15:00, and the shading angle is 15° from 15:00 to 16:00; and the top skylight has a shade angle of 15° from 8:00 to 9:00, 30° from 9:00 to 11:00, 45° from 11:00 to 13:00, and no shade from 13:00 to 16:00. Under winter conditions, the south-facing side windows have no shading all day; the west-facing side windows have no shading from 8:00 to 14:00, and the shading angle is 30° from 14:00 to 16:00; and the top skylight has no shading from 8:00 to 13:00, a shading angle of 45° from 13:00 to 15:00, and a shading angle of 75° from 15:00 to 16:00. This paper provides a set of scientific and reasonable luminous and thermal environment regulation strategies for large-space buildings, which can help optimize the building energy consumption and improve the indoor environment quality. Full article

Private supplementary tutoring (PST) is a flourishing market for edupreneurs whose services relate closely to mainstream education. While international research elaborates on geographical variations in PST and edupreneurs’ marketing strategies, the PST market in Switzerland has been largely understudied. This paper contributes to fill this research gap by presenting a thematic analysis of the websites of edupreneurs offering preparation programmes for the highly selective central entrance examination (CEE) to the academically focused public school track of Gymnasium in Zurich. Conceptually, we draw on “problematization” and “commodificiation” as key terms elaborated by “geographies of marketization”. With this performative conceptualisation of the education market, we examine the marketing strategies of the edupreneurs offering CEE preparation courses. We offer two contributions to the existing research. First, the analysis elaborates that private CEE preparation courses are advertised as a market solution that compensates for an omission caused by public education. Second, we show how edupreneurs use rational and emotional arguments to convince families of the need of booking CEE preparation courses for their children. In the discussion, we engage with the findings of our local case study and argue that selective educational transitions have much wider relevance for policy and society elsewhere. Full article

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between the psychological needs of athletes who attend gyms, the spirituality index of well-being, and motivation in sports, and to determine the mediating role of the spirituality index of well-being between psychological needs in sports and motivation in sports. Although sports spirituality is rapidly developing in the international literature, sports and spirituality have not been studied together in the national literature before. Therefore, this study holds the distinction of being one of the pioneering research efforts on the subject of spirituality in athletes in Türkiye. In this context, the data of 422 athletes, 176 women and 246 men, who have been attending gym facilities in Antalya for at least one year, were included in the research. Participants were administered a personal information form, Psychological Need States. It was found that the spirituality index of well-being is positively related to all satisfaction subscales and negatively related to all frustration subscales of psychological needs and that the life scheme is related to many subscales of sport motivation. Furthermore, it was also found that the spirituality index of well-being is a mediating variable between psychological needs in sports and motivation in sports. The data draw attention to the importance of sports spirituality. It is recommended to integrate spirituality into healthcare for athletes. Full article

With the increasing energy consumption in buildings, the proportion of energy consumption in public buildings continues to grow. As an essential component of public buildings, sports buildings are receiving more attention regarding energy-saving technologies. This paper aims to study the passive energy-saving design methods of small-and medium-sized sports halls in hot summer and cold winter regions, exploring how to reduce building energy consumption by improving the spatial design and thermal performance of the enclosure structures of sports halls. Taking the Wuhu County Sports Center as an example, this study uses computer simulation software to analyze the building’s wind environment and the thermal performance of its external walls and roof. The results show that the large volume of the sports hall significantly impacts the distribution of wind speed and pressure around it, and this impact decreases with height. The thermal simulation of the enclosure structures demonstrates that adding insulation layers to the interior and exterior of the walls and roof of the sports hall is an effective way to reduce energy consumption in both winter and summer. Additionally, wind environment simulations of different roof shapes reveal that flat roofs have the most significant blocking effect on wind and are prone to inducing strong vortices on the leeward side; concave arch roofs have the least blocking effect on airflow, and arch and wave-shaped roofs maintain lower vortex intensity on the leeward side. Hopefully, this study can provide significant references for the energy-saving design of future small- and medium-sized sports buildings. Full article

Due to various factors such as aging, natural environment erosion, and man-made destruction, architectural heritage has formed various diseases and cracks, especially in pathology cracks, which are the most typical masonry–timber architectural heritages, directly affecting the structural stability of masonry–timber buildings. This paper uses artificial intelligence and architecture and other multi-disciplinary research methods, taking James Jackson Gymnasium, a famous masonry–timber architectural heritage in Wuhan, as an example, using 3D laser scanning technology to obtain disease details and crack data of architectural heritage, using a Mask R-CNN model to detect crack area, using an FCN model to identify and calculate single cracks, and finally summarizing the type, location, and characteristics of cracks, analyzing the causes of cracks, and then putting forward corresponding hierarchical restoration strategies. The research results build a set of detection and repair systems of masonry–timber architectural heritage pathology cracks, which provide a set of accurate and objective pathology cracks data for architectural heritage protection and repair, and provide a reference for architectural heritage repair. Full article