In this report the climate impact is determined for some basic structural elements made in steel,>mber and concrete. The aim is to compare the climate impact of these three building materials byquan>fying the emissions related to the produc>on and construc>on of some typical structures.The comparison comprise two parts, were one is the comparison of members in bending,compression and tension and the other part is the comparison of a couple of floor structures.The emissions are determined through a Life Cycle Assessment, LCA. The members are comparedwith respect to their load bearing resistance and the floor structures is compared per square meter.The mo>va>on for this inves>ga>on is that the construc>on industry is a large contributor to the totalamount of greenhouse gas emissions and in order to reduce these emissions new solu>ons andprac>ses must be adopted. A more thoughVul choice of the materials used in structures has thepoten>al of reducing the emissions.The method of determining the climate impact is based on first determining the material quan>>esfor all the inves>gated structures and then calcula>ng the amount of carbon dioxide equivalentsrelated to the produc>on of these materials with the help of a Life Cycle Assessment.The material quan>>es of the structural members is determined based on the load. The dimensionsof the cross sec>on is determined with respect to the required load resistance. The materialquan>>es of the floor structures is based on some exis>ng solu>ons from manufacturers.The study show that the >mber based design solu>ons almost always has a smaller climate impactand that the differences can be considerable. Members made in steel oZen result in very largeamount of greenhouse gas emissions but the sca[er in the results indicate that the origin of the steelhas great importance. Primary steel has a much larger impact as opposed to recycled steel.The comparison of the floor designs show that beyond the material choice itself, also the materialefficiency is important. The hollow core slab made in concrete is a very material efficient design andmay in some cases be on par with >mber based designs.The massive >mber floors made of Cross Laminated Timber, CLT, has a fairly large climate impactbecause of the sheer volume of material and may be on the same level as the floor made in concretefor some scenarios. There is however a wide range in the result based on whether the material istransported a long distance and depending on the choice of insula>on material. If these choices isop>mised, the emissions of the CLT floor is instead on a much lower level, closer to that of the otherlightweight floors inves>gated.The process of evalua>ng and comparing the material choices and structural designs form a lifecycleperspec>ve can be u>lised during the design in order to reduce the emissions. With a be[erknowledge of the climate impact of the design, be[er choices can be made in order to reduce theemissions.

The European commission has in the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive from 2010 decided that its member states were required to ensure that all new buildings by the end of 2020 were nearly zero-energy buildings. These buildings require small amounts of energy compared to its performance in example by keeping a pleasant indoor climate. To achieve these goals there is an option for integrating phase changing material into building material.   The purpose of this project was to determine which kind of PCM is suitable for use in building materials to increase its fire resitance, taking inspiration from the report Fasomvandlingsmaterial: Risker och möjligheter written by Michael Försth, Alexandra Byström and Jonathan Wolf. In particular, the aim was to observe if the application of PCM, in pure powder form, into pure concrete could increase the time until it reaches it critical temperature of 500 °C. The choice of PCM to be used was decided by a literature review and initial thermal tests, and in this case, Magnesium Carbonate Hydroxide Pentahydrate, MCHP, was used as a substitute for the cement, in this project.    The project has been carried out through a literature review and laboratory experiments. The laboratory experiments were performed in different stages. First, the thermal properties of the PCM were decided by using a DSC (differential scanning calorimeter) and a TGA (Thermogravimetric analysis). Three kinds of PCMs (Magnesium hydroxide, Aluminium hydroxide and MCHP) were tested from the results of the literature review. The DSC gave a variation in results between the three tested PCMs. MCHP showed two melting phases which produced different kind of fire-retardant products and theoretically would give two instances of stopping the heating of the concrete. With that MCHP was then chosen as the most appropriate one to be incorporated into concrete. From there, pure concrete samples and with PCM mixed in, with different weight percentage varying between 2-10 weight percent (wt.%) of the cements weight, with a thermocouple embedded in the bottom were manufactured. Thereafter, a cone calorimeter was used with the constant heat flux of 50 kW·m-2 as a source of heat radiation.   The results shows that the application of the PCM in the concrete by replacing the cement does not give any noticeable increase in its fire resistance by increasing the time until it reaches 500 °C. Neither did it show any signs of the heating curve to flatten out, which in theory would have occurred during melting of the PCM. This could depend on the way the heat transfers down through the concrete and melts the PCM along the way towards the bottom and the thermocouple measuring the temperature. Making the thermocouple only register the heating of the concrete in close proximity to it. Therefore only a small amount of PCM melts and the required energy is not enough to halt the heating. Theoretical calculations performed showed that the melting of the PCM in the case with 5 and 10 wt.% gave an improvement by increasing the time until critical temperature is reached with 4 % and 7.3 %, compared to a pure concrete sample. The melting of the PCM is responsible for 1 % respectively 2 % of that time increased compared to the pure concrete sample. The rest of the increase in time comes from the PCMs thermal properties which is higher than the cement. The literature study shows that there exist many suitable PCM for increasing a building material’s fire resistance, some of which are already used as fire retardants. It also shows that PCM can affect a material’s fire resistance in more ways than just the heat storage (latent heat) in the melting phase.    The conclusion of this report is that substituting concrete with MCHP in powder form is not suitable and does not affect the concretes fire resistance. But the usage of PCM in concrete should not be dismissed. There exist different ways to implement the PCM into the concrete which could give a desirable result.

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The increasing popularity of drones has made it convenient to capture a large number of images of a property, which can then be used to build a 3D model. The conditions of buildings can be analyzed to plan renovations. This creates an interest for automatically identifying building materials, a task well suited for machine learning. With access to drone imagery of buildings as well as depth maps and normal maps, we created a dataset for semantic segmentation. Two different convolutional neural networks were trained and evaluated, to see how well they perform material segmentation. DeepLabv3+, which uses RGB data, was compared to Depth-Aware CNN, which uses RGB-D data. Our experiments showed that DeepLabv3+ achieved higher mean intersection over union. To investigate if the information in the depth maps and normal maps could give a performance boost, we conducted experiments with an encoding we call HMN - horizontal disparity, magnitude of normal with ground, normal parallel with gravity. This three channel encoding was used to jointly train two CNNs, one with RGB and one with HMN, and then sum their predictions. This led to improved results for both DeepLabv3+ and Depth-Aware CNN. / Den ökade populariteten av drönare har gjort det smidigt att ta ett stort antal bilder av en fastighet, och sedan skapa en 3D-modell. Skicket hos en byggnad kan enkelt analyseras och renoveringar planeras. Det är då av intresse att automatiskt kunna identifiera byggnadsmaterial, en uppgift som lämpar sig väl för maskininlärning.  Med tillgång till såväl drönarbilder av byggnader som djupkartor och normalkartor har vi skapat ett dataset för semantisk segmentering. Två olika faltande neuronnät har tränats och utvärderats för att se hur väl de fungerar för materialigenkänning. DeepLabv3+ som använder sig av RGB-data har jämförts med Depth-Aware CNN som använder RGB-D-data och våra experiment visar att DeepLabv3+ får högre mean intersection over union. För att undersöka om resultaten kan förbättras med hjälp av datat i djupkartor och normalkartor har vi kodat samman informationen till vad vi valt att benämna HMN - horisontell disparitet, magnitud av normalen parallell med marken, normal i gravitationsriktningen. Denna trekanalsinput kan användas för att träna ett extra CNN samtidigt som man tränar med RGB-bilder, och sedan summera båda predikteringarna. Våra experiment visar att detta leder till bättre segmenteringar för både DeepLabv3+ och Depth-Aware CNN.

This study will provide background information about the region of Bangladesh, more specifically the coastal rural area of Bangladesh. This region has due to the global warming become a very disaster-prone region where disaster resilience work has become increasingly relevant. Displacement of the rural coastal population due to disasters is an ongoing issue in Bangladesh which inhibits the large urbanization the capital city, Dhaka faces. This has increased the need of housing which has stimulated the brick industry that has increased its contribution to Bangladesh GDP the last years. Though the brick industry has traditionally been dominated by environmentally unfriendly methods that has caused deforestation and severe air pollution contributing to the cause of its demand creating a negative feedback loop. This study will analyse four different building materials including the traditional one by collecting data, creating analyse models and discussing them to find a more financial, environmental and technical suitable alternative to respond to the current situation to try turn the tide focusing on the rural coastal areas of Bangladesh.

In this thesis we investigate concepts associated with aggregation. The basic idea of aggregation is that there exists a reduced order model such that, for an appropriate initial condition, the trajectories of the reduced-order model are linear combinations of the trajectories of the ful 1-order model. We study systems which do not aggregate exactly, but which "nearly aggregate". It is shown that for "nearly aggregable" systems there exists a reduced-order model such that, for an appropriate initial condition, the trajectories of the reduced-order model are near a linear combination of the trajectories of the full-order model. Under certain conditions it has also been shown that near-aggregation is equivalent to near-unobservability (roughly, an invariant subspace close to the null space of C). Here we establish a relationship between near-unobservability and modal measures of observability as suggested by Selective Modal Analysis. With this result we then obtain an upper bound on the norm of the transfer function residue using near-unobservability measures. The Generalized Hessenberg Representation (GHR) and Dual GHR are examined throughout this analysis. It is finally shown that for SISO systems, the residue norm may be expressed in terms of certain parameters of the Dual GHR. / M.S.

M.S.

Waste from construction and demolition-building activities is increasing every day. Landfills have almost reached their capacity. When thinking about the negative impact of demolishing activities on the environment it becomes very necessary to think about reusing and recycling building materials in new construction or perhaps better recycling our thoughts on how to make use of waste materials. In Kevin Lynch's book, Wasting Away, he wrote: "Architects must begin to think about holes in the ground and about flows of materials." Studies show that construction and demolition activities are the primary source of solid waste worldwide. For example construction and demolition wastes constitute about 40% of the total solid waste stream in the United States. The growing interest in materials and resource conservation in the United States is inherent in the growth of green building practices. The USGBC identifies six categories in the Materials and Resources (MR) section of LEED. One of these six categories is Resource Reuse (RR). Interestingly enough, a recent study about the cost of green buildings indicated that RR was the category credits least often achieved in most LEED certified projects. Literature suggests that there are a number of constraints and barriers to resource reuse primarily due to the complexity of buildings but perhaps the most important barrier, according to many architects, is the lack of easily accessible information to the design team on resource reuse. Therefore, as we promote the idea of building material reuse to a wider audience of designers and architects, we mus not forget that in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, both Reuse and Recycle terms are used interchangeably without yet a clear distinction between them. The use of arbitrary descriptions to distinguish reuse from recycle has caused nothing but more confusion to the public. This study argues that the real distinction between reuse and recycle exists in Knowledge and Information. This suggests that design with reuse requires a paradigm shift in the required knowledgebase and the way information flows within the design process. Unfortunately, the structure of this paradigm shift is not known and has not been well defined. Since knowledge forms the core of building a Decision Support Systems (DSS) for a design team in order to consider reuse, it is necessary to capture the required knowledge and information from the industry experts through a Knowledge Acquisition (KA) process. This knowledge can then be used to 1) identify the building material reuse criteria and 2) to build a prescriptive decision model and 3) to map the process design of the current traditional architectural design workflow and the proposed one. The overarching goal of this study is to use the building material reuse knowledgebase for 1) building a Unified Virtual Repository database to be connected to all available physical repositories and share a unified standard of information. 2) When the unified virtual repository is integrated with the Building Information Modeling (BIM) database, the DSS can work as a feedback and feed forward support for architects and designers as they consider building material reuse in new designs and constructions. / Ph. D.

The idea of tilt-up construction started in America in the early I900’s. In the beginning, this technique was mainly used on structures such as industrial warehouses and factories. However, recent developments and improvements in tilt-up construction technique and accessories have enabled this building method to be applied to many architecturally appealing offices and residential structures. There are many details the design-build team must consider to ensure the success of a tilt-up project. The floor slab must be designed for panel casting and to withstand the loading of the mobile crane which will be used to lift the panel. The crane capacity affects the panel size and weight. Proper curing and bondbreaker application are very important to reduce bonding and to ensure clear cleavage between concrete surfaces. Changing rigging configuration consumes expensive crane time and must be reduced to minimum possible. The availability of ground-release quick connect/disconnect tilt—up hardware improves workers safety and speeds up the erection process substantially. Although the stress analysis of simple wall panels during erection can be done by hand, panels with more complicated geometry or with openings, are more efficiently analysed with a computer. Many manufacturers have technical services to help in the design of insert layout so that the concrete will not be over stressed when the panel is tilted into position. After the panel is plumbed, it is braced temporarily before the final connection is made. For in-place loading there are now design aids available which ease the design process. When properly designed and built, tilt—up has proved to be a fast, efficient, and economical building construction technique. / Master of Science