Through the years, the concept of Value has been widely discussed covering diverse fields of knowledge, such as marketing, business management, strategy, engineering, design, and the like. Within the construction industry field, highly praised management approaches have been used to deliver Value such as Value Engineering, Value Management and Lean Thinking. As a result of the complex nature of this concept, different definitions, equations and models have been proposed to mainly deliver Value from a customer focused perspective. Therefore, the potential of the construction industry has been usually limited by the fulfilment of individual requirements. Thus, environmental and social issues have been generally managed from a bill payer perspective. During the course of this research, Chilean experience in Social Housing Projects was investigated. Initial author observation, analysis of governmental policies and data collected from three case studies allowed to evidence an emergent phenomenon in developing countries such as Chile and in the construction sector experience in general. This phenomenon considers Value as an oscillating concept, which means Value delivered by a particular construction project continuously impacts society in a wide sense, and provides a legacy for future generations. In the same way, Value delivered for particular projects affects in turn those judgments concerning future projects and contribute with the permanent improvement of the construction sector s performance (learning from experience). Consequently, the construction industry contributes to the development of society through the alleviation of environmental & society issues such as drug consumption, social risk, public safety and so forth. Along the time, the decisions and activities of the construction industry have influenced more than a reduced set of customers. Therefore, there is no reasoning against the fact that the human species depends on many sorts of building and infrastructure projects to perform their activities and that the more developed a society or country is, the more such structures are needed. This is an absolute matter of fact. Consequently, building projects as the outcome of build environment could be considered as the physical reflection of our current decisions. They represent major investments in the future delivery, where several human, natural, monetary and technological resources are devoted. Those projects provide a legacy to future generations based on what we have valued today, and how much we care about tomorrow and the stability of our ecosystem. Therefore, the concept of Value in the construction management field should be visualised from a wider perspective towards the consideration of universal environmental & social issues. The consideration of this phenomenon is even more important in developing countries, where opportunities still exist to create a well-balanced built environment that supports society. In an attempt to conceptualise a wider view of Value in the construction industry, different approached to manage Value were investigated. As a result, Lean Thinking arose as a potential philosophy to expand common customer focused Value perspectives. Additionally, different features and multidimensional attributes of the concept of Value were identified. To aid the visualisation of Value in the construction industry, a conceptual model was developed and named the First and Last Value Model F&LVM. According to this model, the delivery of Value spans across two different contexts: First context, which refers to Value delivery to the society (First Value: Environmental & Social issues), and Last context, which deals with Value delivery at project level (Last Value: Production process). This model also considers the interaction between three Value domains: Production & Delivery capacity; Stakeholders perspective; and Social perspective. From this interaction, four central perspectives are included towards a wider visualisation of Value: Technological, economic, environmental and political. Moreover, this model considers Value as an objective, subjective, dynamic, context dependent, relative, and oscillating concept. Finally, the F&LVM was evaluated under the criteria of both researchers and practitioners from Lean Construction, whose potential contributes to a sustainable development. Evaluator s feedback demonstrated that this model contributes to a wider conceptualisation of Value in the construction industry.

An essential factor adversely affecting the performance of construction projects is the improper handling of materials during site activities. Materials management is made problematic by materials shortages, delays in supply, price fluctuations, damage and wastage, and lack of storages pace. In addition, paper-based reports are mostly used to record and exchange information related to the materials component within a supply chain which is problematic, error-prone, and inefficient. Generally, modem technologies are not being adequately used to overcome human error and are not well integrated with project management systems to make the tracking and management of materials easier and faster. Thus, this research focuses on the development of a mechanism to improve materials management on construction projects through the integration of materials tracking and resource modelling systems. A multi-facetted research approach was adopted. Initially, a literature review on materials management process in the construction project was conducted. This was followed by case studies involving six construction projects in order to investigate current practice in materials management to establish key problem areas and elements of good practice. The case studies also explored the requirements for integrating materials management and resource modelling in project management systems. The case study findings underpinned by literature results were used to develop a real-time framework for integrating RFID-based materials tracking and resource modelling. The framework was encapsulated in a computer-based prototype system based on Microsoft Visual Basic. NET. The prototype system was developed by amalgamation of all the software and hardware chosen such as MS Access (database system), MS Project (resource modelling) and RFID (automated materials tracking) to provide the mechanisms for integrating materials management and resource modelling in the construction industry. Evaluation of the prototype system was carried out by a series of interviews with industry practitioners to assess its appropriateness and functionality. It also established the skills and other requirements for the effective use of the real-time materials tracking system. The evaluation established that the prototype system demonstrated many benefits and is suitable for use in materials tracking and inventory management processes. It is concluded that the prototype system developed can improve materials management on construction projects, particularly with regard to materials tracking and integrating materials utilisation with the resource modelling subsystem in project management applications. Adoption of the approaches suggested in the thesis will enable the construction industry to improve the real-time management of materials on sites, and hence improve project performance.

Considering deconstruction as a means of achieving sustainable construction, would enable the construction industry to address some of its environmental problems. In addition, the growing pressure from the public and legislation for environmental considerations, means that there is now a need for the construction industry to increasingly consider the recycling and reuse of building components used in constructing buildings. The deconstruction of buildings provides the construction industry with the opportunities to effectively deal with its unsustainable construction practices. One of the approaches taken by industry to facilitate the adoption of deconstruction is designing a building with the intention of disassembly instead of demolition at the end of its useful life. This concept is known as Design for Deconstruction (DFD). Although some research works have been undertaken to support and establish deconstruction into current construction practice, there is little or no guidance for practitioners on how best to do this. This need to fully integrate the concept of design for deconstruction into the current project delivery process is the basis of this research. In order to contextualise, corroborate and develop the research, a review of existing literature on sustainable construction and deconstruction was undertaken. Following from the review of literature, a survey and case study were undertaken to explore the current practice of deconstruction and investigate a practical example of sustainable construction practice that reflects the integration of deconstruction principles within the building process. The findings from the review of literature, the survey and case study were used to develop a mechanism for integrating deconstruction into the building process. The mechanism is a process model for the construction industry to implement the concept of DFD from inception to completion of a building project and throughout a building's lifecycle. Evaluation of the developed process model was carried out by industry practitioners to assess its suitability and practicability. The feedback from the evaluation established that the process model is effective in enabling some aspects of sustainability principles such as designing to minimise waste and encouraging the reuse and recycle of building materials and components. Several benefits and potentials of the process model were also identified. Considering deconstruction as a means of achieving sustainable construction, would enable the construction industry to address some of its environmental problems. In addition, the growing pressure from the public and legislation for environmental considerations, means that there is now a need for the construction industry to increasingly consider the recycling and reuse of building components used in constructing buildings. The deconstruction of buildings provides the construction industry with the opportunities to effectively deal with its unsustainable construction practices. One of the approaches taken by industry to facilitate the adoption of deconstruction is designing a building with the intention of disassembly instead of demolition at the end of its useful life. This concept is known as Design for Deconstruction (DFD). Although some research works have been undertaken to support and establish deconstruction into current construction practice, there is little or no guidance for practitioners on how best to do this. This need to fully integrate the concept of design for deconstruction into the current project delivery process is the basis of this research. In order to contextualise, corroborate and develop the research, a review of existing literature on sustainable construction and deconstruction was undertaken. Following from the review of literature, a survey and case study were undertaken to explore the current practice of deconstruction and investigate a practical example of sustainable construction practice that reflects the integration of deconstruction principles within the building process. The findings from the review of literature, the survey and case study were used to develop a mechanism for integrating deconstruction into the building process. The mechanism is a process model for the construction industry to implement the concept of DFD from inception to completion of a building project and throughout a building's lifecycle. Evaluation of the developed process model was carried out by industry practitioners to assess its suitability and practicability. The feedback from the evaluation established that the process model is effective in enabling some aspects of sustainability principles such as designing to minimise waste and encouraging the reuse and recycle of building materials and components. Several benefits and potentials of the process model were also identified.Considering deconstruction as a means of achieving sustainable construction, would enable the construction industry to address some of its environmental problems. In addition, the growing pressure from the public and legislation for environmental considerations, means that there is now a need for the construction industry to increasingly consider the recycling and reuse of building components used in constructing buildings. The deconstruction of buildings provides the construction industry with the opportunities to effectively deal with its unsustainable construction practices. One of the approaches taken by industry to facilitate the adoption of deconstruction is designing a building with the intention of disassembly instead of demolition at the end of its useful life. This concept is known as Design for Deconstruction (DFD). Although some research works have been undertaken to support and establish deconstruction into current construction practice, there is little or no guidance for practitioners on how best to do this. This need to fully integrate the concept of design for deconstruction into the current project delivery process is the basis of this research. In order to contextualise, corroborate and develop the research, a review of existing literature on sustainable construction and deconstruction was undertaken. Following from the review of literature, a survey and case study were undertaken to explore the current practice of deconstruction and investigate a practical example of sustainable construction practice that reflects the integration of deconstruction principles within the building process. The findings from the review of literature, the survey and case study were used to develop a mechanism for integrating deconstruction into the building process. The mechanism is a process model for the construction industry to implement the concept of DFD from inception to completion of a building project and throughout a building's lifecycle. Evaluation of the developed process model was carried out by industry practitioners to assess its suitability and practicability. The feedback from the evaluation established that the process model is effective in enabling some aspects of sustainability principles such as designing to minimise waste and encouraging the reuse and recycle of building materials and components. Several benefits and potentials of the process model were also identified. Thus, in this research, it can be concluded that integrating the concept of deconstruction into the construction project delivery process can assist the industry to better reuse and recycle building materials and achieve a sustainable environment. Furthermore, the expected impact of the research on the construction industry is a practical process model that can be used to incorporate the concept of deconstruction into the project delivery process. This can be adopted at all the stages of the building process and would benefit the industry as it offers a solution to reduce the environmental impacts caused by its activities.

Fire in buildings can have a severe impact in terms of both human safety and potential economic loss. This is especially true in the case of fires of such severity that the building structure is damaged. Concrete buildings are traditionally regarded as safe in a fire situation as concrete is non-flammable and exhibits highly insulating material properties. The majority of current research relating to the impact of fire on structures examines other forms of construction. Research of concrete in fire is generally limited to investigation and testing of individual members in order to understand the often complex interactions exhibited by concrete as a material at high temperatures. This research seeks to redress the balance by using a systematic approach to examine effects of fire on a holistic concrete structure in simplified but realistic temperature exposures. The research utilises evidence and structural information from the Windsor Tower in Madrid, which suffered a major fire in February 2005 with partial collapse in some areas of the structure. The fire spread throughout the building, travelling both upwards and downwards. Computer modelling was used extensively. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis was used to explore likely fire temperature and duration in localised areas. Structural Finite Element Modelling (FEM) was used to develop a hierarchy of models, beginning with simple structural forms and progressing logically to more detailed structures. This produced a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the reaction of the structure to fire for comparison to the real, observable damage to the building and assessment of generic failure behaviours. The structural model produced was used with a number of variations in support condition, fire spread rate and extent, and fire protection. It was found that for a structure of this type, structural stiffness of the concrete floors was insufficient to compensate for the loss of strength in heated steel members where there was no alternative load redistribution path. It was also found that in the case where an alternative load path exists, but involves steel members which have previously heated during the multiple-floor spread of the fire, the rate of fire spread has a critical effect on the structural stability.

The construction industry has been facing immense challenges to move towards more- sustainable buildings with minimum harm to the environment. The building design and construction process is conditioned by numerous sustainability regulations and assessment measures, to promote sustainable construction. These regulations are continuously expanding in their requirements, and incorporating a huge amount of data that needs to be rigorously dealt with, in order to check compliance and asses the performance Building Information Modelling (BIM) promotes the effective information and process integration across the building life-cycle and supply chain. This integration should comply with an increasingly-complex regulatory environment and statutory requirements. The aim of this thesis is to improve and facilitate the sustainability compliance checking process, by focusing on inter-operability between existing methods of compliance checking and building information modelling. This thesis presents a generic approach for BIM based compliance checking against standards and regulations, with a particular focus on sustainable design and procurement. To achieve this, a methodology has been developed to enable automated sustainability compliance checking. This involves (a) extracting regulatory requirements from sustainability-related regulations available in textual format; (b) converting these into BIM- compatible rules; (c) processing these rules through a dedicated rule-based service; and (d) performing regulatory compliance analysis underpinned by the concept of BIM. A semantic extension of the IFC (Industrial Foundation Classes) for sustainability compliance checking has been developed. The outcome of the research was implemented in the RegBIM project and is in the process of being exploited as an online service by industrial organization, the Building Research Establishment (BRE) in the UK.

Fire Safety Engineering is required at every stage in the life cycle of modern-day buildings. Fire safety design, detection and suppression, and emergency response are all vital components of Structural Fire Safety but are usually perceived as independent issues. Sensor deployment and exploitation is now common place in modern buildings for means such as temperature, air quality and security management. Despite the potential wealth of information these sensors could afford fire fighters, the design of sensor networks within buildings is entirely detached from procedures associated to emergency management. The experiences of Dalmarnock Fire Test Two showed that streams of raw data emerging from sensors lead to a rapid information overload and do little to improve the understanding of the complex phenomenon and likely future events during a real fire. Despite current sensor technology in other fields being far more advanced than that of fire, there is no justification for more complex and expensive sensors in this context. In isolation therefore, sensors are not sufficient to aid emergency response. Fire modelling follows a similar path. Two studies of Dalmarnock Fire Test One demonstrate clearly the current state of the art of fire modelling. A Priori studies by Rein et al. 2009 showed that blind prediction of the evolution of a compartment fire is currently beyond the state of the art of fire modelling practice. A Posteriori studies by Jahn et al. 2007 demonstrated that even with the provision of large quantities of sensor data, video footage, and prior knowledge of the fire; producing a CFD reconstruction was an incredibly difficult, laborious, intuitive and repetitive task. Fire fighting is therefore left as an isolated activity that does not benefit from sensor data or the potential of modelling the event. In isolation sensors and fire modelling are found lacking. Together though they appear to form the perfect compliment. Sensors provide a plethora of information which lacks interpretation. Models provide a method of interpretation but lack the necessary information to make this output robust. Thus a mechanism to achieve accurate, timely predictions by means of theoretical models steered by continuous calibration against sensor measurements is proposed. Issues of accuracy aside, these models demand heavy resources and computational time periods that are far greater than the time associated with the processes being simulated. To be of use to emergency responders, the output would need to be produced faster than the event itself with lead time to enable planning of an intervention strategy. Therefore in isolation, model output is not robust or fast enough to be implemented in an emergency response scenario. The concept of super-real time predictions steered by measurements is studied in the simple yet meaningful scenario of concurrent flow flame spread. Experiments have been conducted with PMMA slabs to feed sensor data into a simple analytical model. Numerous sensing techniques have been adapted to feed a simple algebraic expression from the literature linking flame spread, flame characteristics and pyrolysis evolution in order to model upward flame spread. The measurements are continuously fed to the computations so that projections of the flame spread velocity and flame characteristics can be established at each instant in time, ahead of the real flame. It was observed that as the input parameters in the analytical models were optimised to the scenario, rapid convergence between the evolving experiment and the predictions was attained.

In the summer of 2007, the number of people living in the world’s urban areas exceeded that of those living in the countryside. Such urbanisation tends to modify the climates of towns and cities as a result of a number of factors which together form the ‘urban heat island’ effect. In order to better design buildings and urban areas to cope with these effects, it is first necessary to understand the heat transfer mechanisms which are taking place. The aim of the current research has therefore been to provide convective heat transfer data appropriate for low-rise urban environments by investigating the effects of wind speed, direction and street geometry. The research has employed the naphthalene sublimation technique which has been extended in several fundamental areas including development of a novel approach to measure the rate of sublimation from wind tunnel models. This technique has permitted measurements to be made over an array of discrete locations, revealing the variation across building surfaces. The uncertainty in the convective heat transfer coefficients obtained was calculated to be approximately ±6%. Tests were conducted in the BRE wind tunnel with an atmospheric boundary layer simulation appropriate to inner city areas. Cube models were arranged so as to form long rows of flat-roofed buildings referred to as ‘street canyons’. A series of correlations have been derived from the experimental results from which the rate of convection occurring from each building surface may be obtained with respect to wind speed. The greatest rates of convective heat transfer have been shown to occur at the top of the windward wall and leading edge of the roof, the lowest rates from the leeward wall of a building. Convection was found to be reduced in narrow street canyons. In wider street canyons, the convective coefficients on the exposed windward and roof surfaces of buildings were higher, but the values on the leeward wall are lessened due to the distancing of the downstream windward vortex. The effect of wind direction was found to be relatively small and therefore it is proposed that the convective heat transfer relationships presented may be applied irrespective of wind direction.

The stability of glass is linked to its composition and the atmosphere controls its alteration. The organic pollutants emitted by wooden showcases play a role in the alteration of historic glasses. This study examines the effects of acetic acid, formic acid and formaldehyde on objects from the National Museums of Scotland and on replica glasses aged artificially, all with a soda silicate composition. Composition was determined by electron microprobe and analytical decomposition of the Raman spectra was used to establish correlations between glass structure and composition. This allowed interpretation of the structural variations between bulk and altered glass. The structure of the glasses altered by pollutants is characteristic of an alteration by selective leaching, with transformation of the silicates linked to alkali into silanols, which subsequently underwent condensation reactions to form a more polymerised structure. The SIMS concentration profiles of glass aged in artificial and real atmospheres were used to follow the alteration evolution as a function of time, humidity and pollutant concentration. The water film formed by the humidity at the surface and its acidity control the alteration by leaching of alkali and hydration of the glass. Formaldehyde does not act on the leaching reaction while acids accelerate and amplify it. In mixed polluted atmosphere, formates compounds always predominate in the film even at low formic acid concentration. The humidity and temperature fluctuations in museums maintain the leaching reaction. Knowledge of the harmful effect of organic acid pollutants in the alteration of soda silicate glasses will help improve their conservation.

No description available.

The major goal of this study is to define the paleoclimatic conditions in Ankara region during Plio-Pleistocene period by evaluating the mineralogical and geochemical proxies carried from the paleosols and their calcretes. The field observations, mineralogical, micromorphological, geochemical and stable isotope investigations were all conducted to achieve a paleoclimatic approach. As pedogenic minerals in calcretes, presence of dolomite with palygorskite in the Karahamzali section and calcite with palygorskite in the Bala section together with high salinity and calcification values reveal the semi-arid and dry climatic conditions. The geochemical signatures of the paleosols are consistent with each other indicating low clastic input during the dry seasons favouring the formation of calcretes. The &delta / 13C and &delta / 18O values indicate the formation of calcretes from percolating soil-water under predominantly C4 to C3:C4 association type vegetation. Temperature calculations show that paleoclimatic conditions favouring the formation of calcretes in the region are semi-arid and seasonally dry with approximately 25&deg / C soil depositional temperature. This study is the first to give both a radiometric age data to the calcretes of Central Anatolia, Ankara and document their stable isotope compositions. Dated calcretes having ESR ages of 419&plusmn / 69ka and 761 &plusmn / 120ka point the formation during Middle Pleistocene when Mid-Brunches Event (MBE) was happened and the periodicity changed affecting the climatic control over the European continent. Like the Mediterranean calcretes, this study suggests that calcretes in the study area started to develop with MBE warmth between Marine Isotope Stages of 13- 11 and 19-17.