No description available.

No description available.

The British Construction Industry has been criticised for many years. Comparisons have shown that construction in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and Australia is cheaper and quicker than present practice in the UK. In the UK the traditional system of construction, separates the two main disciplines of design and construction. The design is carried out by a consultant and the construction is carried out by a contractor. As a result of this the construction industry is suffering from many problems such as design complexity, increasing costs and longer construction duration. This thesis addresses the detail design stage of the design process. Detail design decisions have a significant impact on cost and time. The UK contractors have no important influence at the design stage, because designers do not take adequate and accurate account of construction methods, actual costs and the value of time. The traditional system prevents this involvement. To overcome this problem, constructability was cited as being c, apable of improving project performance. There is, however no clear understanding of why or how to formally incorporate construction knowledge as part of the process of design. The designer could reduce problems for the contractor by being more aware of the construction process and the potential delays and inefficiencies which are often introduced during design. Similarly, the contractor could aid the design by contributing his knowledge of site practices to the designer and improving communications during the construction process. The thesis focuses on integrating construction expertise with the design process at the detail design phase. It explores both the designer's and the constructor's view points, and presents a design process model.

In the present energy and CO2 emission conscious climate natural ventilation is undergoing increasingly intensive research. Buildings located in a sheltered in-fill location subject to single-sided natural ventilation are a common occurrence. However, the combination of stack effect and wind effect induced natural ventilation rates is not well defined. This thesis investigates the influence of wind on a sheltered building subject to single-sided natural ventilation. Full-scale experiments were undertaken over a wide variety of prevailing conditions on a suitable test cell to provide the measurements for the investigation. The analysis established that the flow/pressure drop relationship representing the airflow across the boundary of the building was best described by a power law relationship with an index of n=0.6348, rather than the conventional Bernoulli equation (which reflects a special case of the power law relationship when the index n=0.5). "Warren" plots, modified to reflect the power law flow/pressure drop relationship, identified stack effect dominance for the test cell. However, the wind was shown to influence the single-sided natural ventilation rates by virtue of the wind direction altering the flow path through the openings in the building and, so, affecting the flow characteristics of the openings. The investigation enabled a prediction model to be developed whereby the natural ventilation rates in the test cell subject to single-sided natural ventilation could be predicted from internal and external temperature and wind direction. Validation of the model identified an over-prediction for high stack effect driving forces and underprediction for low driving forces. The over- and under-prediction was concluded to be the result of incorporating the flow characteristics of the building openings as constant values. The flow characteristics should be treated as a variable function of wind direction and the stack effect driving force.

This thesis is concerned with the phenomenon of Rising Damp, which is a complex example of the simultaneous flows of volume (water), heat, solutes and electricity within a porous material. The physical complexity of this natural occurrence has required that the phenomenon be reduced into a series of scientific areas or related topics, which are presented as separate chapters. A full account of the structure of the thesis can be found in the introduction section. The common areas covered in this work are mathematical description of the loss of moisture by damp porous materials (i.e. evaporation) and of the movement of moisture within unsaturated porous materials both in terms of non linear "Diffusivity" type expressions (Chapter Three) or more usefully in terms of non linear "free energy" type expressions (Chapter Eight); capillary suction developed in damp walls. Other less common topics investigated are leaching of soluble materials from the porous matrix and prediction of the consequent increase in matrix permeability to fluid; electro kinetic aspects of Rising Damp; coupling of transport processes within porous materials. Several of the topics discussed in this work are common to several scientific disciplines giving rise to a 'looseness' and 'multiplicity' of nomenclature. To overcome this problem, particular care and space has been devoted to explaining the terminology used in this work, which is especially useful to readers who are unfamiliar with this area of study.To conclude, the thesis covers the essential aspects of Rising Damp and, as such, it may be used as a platform from which the phenomenon can be investigated more comprehensively

This thesis explores the apparent paradox of mutuality in Britain at the turn of the millennium. It contrasts the relative decline of building societies via demutualisation, against the continual governmental support for and growth of credit unions. It begins by constructing a cultural conceptualisation of mutuality, which comprises of four interrelated elements: trust, reciprocity/habit, longevity, and caution. These are formalised in an organisational model of cooperation, which seeks to explain how mutuals function in reality. Both these models are employed to assess the validity of competing explanations of contemporary mutuality. First, a functionalist interpretation, which assumes that demutualisation is an inevitable result of growth, is examined. Second, a neo-Marxist analysis, which believes resource appropriation by building society management, was the motivation for change. However, neither theory was substantiated by the evidence because they could not fully explain why demutualisation did not occur earlier or why new mutuals, namely credit unions, were being established. Consequently a third interpretation synthesising the Neo-Marxist thesis with a cultural post-modern glocal turn was developed. Accordingly, demutualisation occurred because building societies became disembedded from society. First, the culmination of paternalism produced a transformation in the trust relationship between members and management. Second, in the political and economic spheres, Thatcherism and globalisation marginalised any alternative perspectives to the neo-liberal narrative, through the commodification of the personal; discrediting and abasement of the mutual; and the imposition of a crypto-Utopian discourse. Alongside this assault on mutuality a counter-culture of opposition to globalisation, glocalism, created spaces for new mutuals, such as credit unions. Many of these entities deliberately prioritised social over economic objectives and based their attachment on a small locality. By examining mutuals holistically it is hoped that this thesis contributes to a sociological understanding of how cooperative organisations are affected by the state and hypercapitalism.

No description available.

A utility-based method of design for serviceability is developed and applied to a case study of office floor deflections. Structural design for serviceability is reviewed and surveys of engineers and building developers yield information on the occurrence and evaluation of serviceability problems. A probabilistic utility-based formulation of the serviceability design problem is presented, and design optimization is related to pseudo-limit states and associated serviceability indices appropriate to 'single point' design checks. The case study includes the review and adaptation of stochastic load models, the development of a load-response model to account for random spatial variations of structural properties, and detailed numerical modelling of time-dependent deflections of non-prestressed reinforced-concrete slabs. Results indicate that, for a broad class of serviceability problems, approximately optimal deterministic design criteria are related, in a simple manner, to the 'damage' threshold and a design load associated with a serviceability index of roughly 3.5.

QC 20110617

There is still an obvious and indisputable need for an increase in the efficiency of energy utilisation in buildings. Heating, cooling and lighting appliances in buildings account for more than one third of the world’s primary energy demand and there are great potentials, which can be obtained through better applications of the energy use in buildings. This thesis focuses on the development of methods and models for heat and mass transfer processes in buildings, which have a vital impact on the energy utilisation. These models can be used in optimisation procedures aiming at increasing efficiency in the energy use, i.e. at minimising consumption of the necessarily supplied high quality energy, i.e. exergy, in buildings. Through the use of the method of analysing exergy flows in buildings, similar to the analysis applied on other thermodynamic systems, such as power stations, it is possible to identify the potential of increased efficiency in energy utilisation. It has been shown that calculations based on the energy conservation and primary energy concept alone are inadequate for gaining a full understanding of all important aspects of energy utilisation processes. Thus, a method for exergy analyses, based on a combination of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, is presented and an assessment tool has been developed for a better understanding and design of energy flows in buildings. Ventilation heat losses account for a significant fraction of the overall heating energy use in buildings. The implementation of natural ventilation strategies allows for the possibility of supplying indoor space with the required fresh air volume, without any fan power. Because of the ability to create high air flows, the use of natural ventilation can be beneficial to for night cooling processes. All in all, it is important to estimate the expected air flow rates during the design and planning stage of a building. That is why a model, based on earlier published works on single sided natural ventilation on tilting windows, has been developed for natural cross ventilation conditions with tilting windows. There are also building service system solutions which can help to reduce exergy consumption caused by the heating and cooling of rooms. The thermally activated building components are examples of these systems; they use very low temperature differences between the heat carrier medium and the room to be tempered. Earlier derived models of such systems are not always satisfactory for the design of all system configuration or new regulation strategies. The developed macro element modelling (MEM) approach is based on research conducted on the modelling of dynamic heat flows in solid constructions with discrete resistances and capacitances. In this work, it has been expanded by the simultaneous modelling of heat carrier flows and used on the thermally activated components. A methodology for modelling thermally activated components has been developed and verified. Optimised resistance-capacitance (RC) networks combined to so-called macro elements are used to model the solid parts of the system, the fluid temperatures are calculated under the precondition of a linear variation of mass node temperature between the calculation nodes. It has been demonstrated and verified that the MEM method is generally suitable for modelling the dynamic behaviour of combined systems with a heat carrier flow and solid construction parts with substantial heat storage capacity.