Construction Engineering Commons^™

Framework For Enhanced Applicability Of The Egyptian Public Procurement Law To International Administrative Construction Contracts, Amr Abu Helw

Theses and Dissertations

Local governments and public authorities conclude contracts for the purpose of acquisition of goods, delivery of services and construction of public facilities like bridges, infrastructures and public buildings. A public contract is an agreement to perform particular tasks financed by government funds to the benefit of the whole community. Private entities and corporations are subject to stricter standards in their dealings with the government than in private transactions. Conversely, the government must deal fairly and equitably with those who it contracted with to achieve successful implementation of the projects. On October 3, 2018, a new Egyptian public procurement law, namely, …

Teaching Tools For The School Of The Built Environment, Benjamin Laurance Kaufman

Honors Projects

The goal for this honors project was to better the architecture program at Bowling Green State University. Currently, one of the challenges the program faces is a lack of knowledge/understanding about how the built environment is constructed. This project helped to fill that knowledge gap by creating learning/teaching tools that will benefit future classes of architecture students. This project was the result of an interdisciplinary study among the architecture program and the construction management program at Bowling Green State University.

Nasa, Boeing, And Defense Activities: For The Use Of Geopolymers For Space Construction, Terrance E. Bisnauth, Julio Martinez, Saim Wasim

Publications and Research

Good day readers. And with the rate at which our planet earth is being destroyed due to climate change and other catastrophe. That has created serious peril. Food shortages would soon be manifested. So it is wise for us being homosapiens occupy other places to live. And for this to be successful materials would play a significant role for housing us. One of which are Geopolymers.

Investigating Project Success Factors In Post-Disaster Rebuilding Efforts In Nyc, Aalaa Mohammed, Jude R. Vallon, Calvin O. Walters Jr.

Publications and Research

On October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy caused nearly $19 billion in damages in New York City including damage to 69,000 residential units. A precipitated amount of roughly $4.2 billion in Community Development Block Grant was allocated towards PDR construction. These funds addressed a range of needs, including rebuilding and rehabilitating housing, assisting displaced tenants, and providing aid to businesses. Post-Disaster Rebuilding (PDR) is similar to construction in the modification of an existing facility that involves either renovation, additions, or subtractions to scopes of work to assist the overall performance of the facility. However, PDR goes further in a highly coordinated …

Hurricanes And Housing: Highlighting The Ongoing Impact Of Hurricane Michael And The Post-Disaster Housing Problem, Mary Beth Barr

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Hurricanes impact individuals and communities on many levels - emotional, physical, mental, financial - to name a few. Every time a hurricane occurs, lives are drastically altered forever. One of the ways that hurricanes impact individuals and communities most powerfully is through the effect that they have on housing. Unleashing uncontrollable damage to infrastructure and the built environment, hurricanes exacerbate housing problems that exist and create new ones where they did not exist before. Hurricane Michael, which catastrophically impacted the Florida Panhandle in 2018, is a case study in which the impact that hurricanes have on housing is prevalent.

By …

Higher Sound Levels In K-12 Classrooms Correlate To Lower Math Achievement Scores, Laura Caroline Brill, Lily M. Wang

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Sound levels from occupied classrooms have been gathered from 220 classrooms across four grade levels (3, 5, 8 and 11) over six school days each and processed with k-means clustering into speech and non-speech clusters. Three metrics describing the classroom acoustics, including the average daily A-weighted equivalent level for non-speech, the average daily difference between the A-weighted equivalent levels for speech and nonspeech (a signal to noise ratio), and the mid-frequency averaged reverberation time, were analyzed against classroom-aggregated standardized reading and math achievement test scores, while controlling for classroom demographics including socioeconomic status. Interactions between the metrics and demographics were …

Building Services Engineering November/December 2021

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Umass Dartmouth Science And Engineering (Seng) Building Systems Upgrades Project, Jillian Cornelius

UMassBRUT Community

Although UMass Dartmouth's Science and Engineering Building has long been viewed as an architectural treasure, its aging interior and structure have presented some challenges to users nearly 50 years after it opened. This talk examines Ellenzweig's extensive retrofitting of the UMass Dartmouth SENG building for accessibility, a new envelope, updated MEP, and fire-safety measures. After looking at the design phase and interactions with the Mass Historic Commission, the talk ends with an examination of the replacement of windows in the building.

Brutalist Structures – Polychlorinated Biphenyls, Theresa Wolejko

UMassBRUT Community

Until they were banned by the Federal Government in 1978, Polychlorinated Biphenyls or PCBs, were used extensively as sealants in Brutalist structures across the United States. As a result, these hazardous chemical compounds still reside in concrete buildings and present a danger to those looking to clean or renovate Brutalist structures. This talk explains the problems the University of Massachusetts Amherst has faced in dealing with PCBs over the last couple of decades and recommends some best practices for owners, designers, builders working on midcentury buildings which are suspected to contain these dangerous chemicals.

Concrete Deterioration And Diagnosis, Matthew B. Bronski

UMassBRUT Community

Built primarily in the 1960’s, mid-century modernist concrete buildings are now at the age when we regard many as historic or architecturally significant (and thus as deserving of careful restoration and stewardship), but also at an age where many now exhibit significant deterioration. In this presentation, Matthew Bronski describes the most common maladies and deterioration mechanisms that can befall exposed concrete facades, outlines investigative and diagnostic approaches, and discuss the pros and cons of different rehabilitation treatment options, and the importance of tailoring the treatment to the malady.

Umass Amherst Case Studies – Campus Center Plaza & Lederle Graduate Research Center, Elliott Hambrook

UMassBRUT Community

This presentation discusses Gale’s recent experience with repair projects at two (2) brutalist structures on the Amherst Campus at UMass. A board-formed concrete retaining wall at the base of the Murray D. Lincoln Campus Center (Marcel Breuer, 1970) was tastefully modified, but retained, as part of a waterproofing replacement project, addressing water infiltration and improving sight lines across the Campus Center Plaza. The panelized precast concrete façades of the John W. Lederle Graduate Research Center (Campbell, Aldrich, & Nulty, 1969) received new exterior sealants, enlarged panel joints, PCB removal and encapsulation, supplemental panel anchorage, and a waterproof coating.

Concrete Diagnostics & Assessment, Michael Schuller

UMassBRUT Community

The process of repairing Brutalist architecture begins with diagnosis and assessment of the material conditions of these buildings. This talk focuses on the processes that engineers undertake in order to document and access historic concrete before conservators and designers can form a plan to save such buildings. The speaker gives insight into the diagnostic techniques, such a visual assessment, nondestructive evaluation, sounding, moisture and metal detection, and chemical analysis.

Concrete Conservation Strategies And Repair, Paul Gaudette

UMassBRUT Community

Drawing on the speaker's many years in the field, this talk gives a comprehensive overview of concrete conservation. Beginning with the goals and approaches to conserving concrete, the talk then covers common protection systems, petrographic and chemical studies, and the design of mixes used in repairs. In order to demonstrate these techniques, two case studies are examined, including a Brutalist building and building with architectural precast. The talk ends with some recommendations on how to best approach cleaning and conservation of historic concrete buildings.

Lessons Learned From Personal Experience In Adaptive Reuse, Blake Jackson

UMassBRUT Community

This presentation details themes, regarding sustainability, from three adaptive reuse projects of Brutalist and post-war Modernist structures, accentuating overlaps with sustainability, embodied carbon, preservation, densification, and urbanization – all hallmarks regarding the adaptive reuse of these buildings. The first project illustrates opportunities created by up-branding a 1970’s era Sheraton into a “new” W Hotel (Midtown, Atlanta), whereby the preservation of the concrete playfully juxtaposed new interior/exterior design elements. The second project looks at the transformation of a purpose-built newspaper headquarters into a “new” LEED/Fitwel certified commercial facility, which reknit previously separated neighborhoods into a pedestrian/transit-oriented destination, serving as a catalyst …

Approaches To Renewing Brutalist-Era Lab Buildings, Jean Caroon

UMassBRUT Community

Given the immense amount of embodied carbon that mid-century Brutalist structures represent, we must redirect our focus from demolishing these concrete structures to renovating them to fit our needs in the 21st century. Higher education laboratory buildings from the 1960s and 1970s are a particularly challenging type of facility. This talk describes the work that Boston architecture firm Goody Clancy has recently undertaken in renovating over 1 million square feet of lab building space. The talk not only covers specific retrofits and envelope improvements to science buildings, such as the Gant Science Complex at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, …

Humanizing The Brutalist Interior: The Renovation Of Paul Rudolph's Claire T. Carney Library At Umass Dartmouth, Kelly Haigh, Ben Youtz

UMassBRUT Community

Members of the team that worked on the renovation of the Claire T. Carney Library, designed by Paul Rudolph and completed in 1972, share their design solutions for maintaining the integrity of the architecture and fostering an interior that is welcoming of its occupants. Discussions focus on interior attributes, human occupants, color, light and texture as approaches to humanize the massive concrete attributes that are notorious of Brutalist structures.

Modern Heritage: Why It Matters, And What Gci Is Doing To Help Conserve It, Chandler Mccoy

UMassBRUT Community

The Getty Conservation Institute entered the field of conserving modern heritage in 2013, with the establishment of its Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI). The CMAI aims to advance the practice of conserving modern heritage and feels that the best way to retain and reuse modern buildings is by knowing how to maintain, repair and upgrade them, and does this by providing useful tools, case studies, and training to help promote this effort. There has recently been a wave of notable demolition cases which raises the question about the environmental impact of replacing existing buildings with new ones, with many concerned …

The Effects Of The Visual Environment On K-12 Student Achievement, Michael Kuhlenengel, Iason Konstantzos, Clarence E. Waters

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

The varying indoor environments among educational buildings can have an impact on students’ ability to learn. This study looks at field data from 220 classrooms in the Midwest, United States, over a two-year period, to analyze the effects of the visual environment on student achievement. The visual environmental metrics considered within this scope include the three new view metrics introduced within the EN 17037 “Daylight of Buildings” standard (Horizontal Sight Angle, Outside Distance of View, and Number of View Layers), as well as standard daylight and electric lighting metrics, focusing on light availability and glare. To capture student achievement, math …

Construction Of An Apartment Building And Parking Garage, Kirsten Wilson, Kirsten R. Wilson

Honors College Theses

Construction projects are known far and wide to all people. Buildings we need for daily survival would not exist if it were not for the construction industry. Our homes, healthcare facilities, groceries, and other necessary amenities would be gone if it were not for the structures they are housed in. This project aims to simulate the lifespan of a construction job from the design phase to the preconstruction phase and stops at the final presentation before an agreement to start construction.

To create the simulation for the students, a fake RFP, or request for proposal, was created and given to …

Twisted Buildings: Concepts And Approaches, Amani Marmar, Sally Zouia, Sahar Ismail, Ahmad Hallik

Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ)

With the emerging of new technologies, the look for more sustainable towers appears. Through designing twisted towers, an aerodynamic and energy efficient structure can be made to reduce materials and wind loads towards it. By definition, a twisted building is one that has gradually rotating floor plates along its height. The problem here rises due to the risk of structural failure and lack of load transfer and unorganized interior function. Thus, this research aims to detect the design solutions used to execute the twisted buildings achieving stability, safety, and withstanding climatic effects. In order to accomplish the mentioned aim, the …

Potentials Of Containers In Creating Modular Architectural Spaces, Karim Al-Khatib, Jinan Makkawi, Ali Kobeissi

Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ)

Containers are currently considered as one of the inventive trends of framing architectural objects. Container architecture is defined as the type of architecture that is characterised by the usage of steel containers as a structural elements and architectural envelope that can be presented as a part of architecture or a function that an activity can happen in it. Due to the specific dimensions that the container has, architects tend to use it to obtain modularity in their projects and the modular design strategies refer to using the containers as a standard unit to carry out the process, these containers are …

3d Printed Concrete & Polymer Concrete For Infrastructure Applications, Daniel Heras Murcia

Civil Engineering ETDs

Additive manufacturing technology has been established as one of the fastest-growing building technologies worldwide. Three-dimensional concrete printing (3DCP) has developed an increasing interest in the last decade due to its prospects as a transformative technology for industries such as the concrete precast. Besides the improvements in automation technologies in construction, traditional construction has faced considerable challenges: high accident rates, labor dependency, significant potential for automation, and high costs associated with the use of traditional formwork. In this context, three-dimensional concrete, also referred to as physical prototyping, is a novel construction technique in which the concrete is extruded layer-to-layer. 3DCP is …

Simulation For A Mems-Based Ctrnn Ultra-Low Power Implementation Of Human Activity Recognition, Muhammad Emad-Ud-Din, Mohammad H. Hasan, Roozbeh Jafari, Siavash Pourkamali, Fadi M. Alsaleem

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

This paper presents an energy-efficient classification framework that performs human activity recognition (HAR). Typically, HAR classification tasks require a computational platform that includes a processor and memory along with sensors and their interfaces, all of which consume significant power. The presented framework employs microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Network (CTRNN) to performHAR tasks very efficiently. In a real physical implementation, we show that the MEMS-CTRNN nodes can perform computing while consuming power on a nano-watts scale compared to the micro-watts state-of-the-art hardware. We also confirm that this huge power reduction doesn’t come at the expense of reduced …

A Proposal To Harmonize Bim And Iot Data Silos Using Blockchain Application, Zulkefly Abu Bakar, Malachy Mathews Dr

Conference papers

The integration of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Internet of Things (IoT) provide significant end-to-end benefits for the architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) industry. Example applications include on-site assembly services, data localization for built environment, occupancy performance measures and many other analyses that can be used to improve the built environment. However, silos in the BIM and IoT data exchange have impacted the digital process adoption in AECO industry, which aims to change the dynamics and behaviors of the current working process. Penzes, (2018) in his report, acknowledges the AECO industry as one of the most fragmented sectors with …

Framework To Develop Time- And Voltage-Dependent Building Load Profiles Using Polynomial Load Models, Andrew Parker, Mhd Anas Alkrch, Kevin James, Ahmad Almaghrebi, Mahmoud Alahmad

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

The power consumption of buildings over the course of each minute, hour, day and season plays a major role in how this load influences the Electric Power System voltage and frequency, and vice versa. This consumption is based on the building's load component types, efficiencies, and how they consume power and react to changes in real time. Due to this complexity, standard full-building load models are typically voltage-invariant. This paper proposes a novel framework to transform these voltage-invariant building load models into fully time- and voltage-dependent load profiles using available data on the voltage sensitivity of individual load components. While …

A Case Study To Quantify Variability In Building Load Profiles, Andrew Parker, Sam Moayedi, Kevin James, Dongming Peng, Mahmoud Alahmad

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Recent technology development and penetration of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), advanced building control systems, and the internet-of-things (IoT) in the built environment are providing detailed information on building operation, performance, and user's comfort and behavior. Building owners can obtain a wide range of energy consumption details at various levels of time granularity to augment their decisions as they manage the building operation and interact with the grid. AMI data are providing a new level of detail and visibility that may enhance building services and assets in the smart grid domain and make buildings inch closer to becoming a grid-interactive energy …

Introduction To Prefabrication And Automation In Construction, Luciana Debs, Jiansong Zhang, Yunfeng Chen

School of Construction Management Technology Open Educational Resources

New developments and recent advances in construction methods have the potential to change the future of the architecture, engineering and construction industry. Prefabrication, along with modular construction, provides a safe and controlled environment for the production of building construction elements and raises the need for improved collaboration and coordination from design to manufacturing and from transportation to final assembly. Prefabrication also provides relief from the skilled construction labor shortage while opening up new opportunities for mass customization within the building industry. Prefabrication and modular construction automation are emerging expansion routes for the construction industry. In addition, integral to developing the …

Building Services Engineering September/October 2021

Building Services Engineering

No abstract provided.

Digital Construction And Bim Research In Ireland 2016-2020, Barry Mcauley, Roger P. West, Alan V. Hore

Conference papers

As the construction industry opens up post pandemic, new and significant challenges will demand considerable expertise, not least in financial viability, solving the housing crisis and facing the very significant climate change pressures to make the industry less wasteful and less carbon intensive. This presents an excellent opportunity to further inculcate aspects of lean construction, particularly BIM into many aspects of construction not traditionally associated with digital construction, provided the necessary expertise is available and known to exist. Following a well-received recent conference paper summarising BIM-related research published by academics in Ireland’s higher education institutions in 2020, this paper will …

Evaluating Prediction Models Of Creep And Drying Shrinkage Of Self-Consolidating Concrete Containing Supplementary Cementitious Materials/Fillers, Micheal Asaad, George Morcous

Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction: Faculty Publications

Supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) and fillers play an important role in enhancing the mechanical properties and durability of concrete. SCMs and fillers are commonly used in self-consolidating concrete (SCC) mixtures to also enhance their rheological properties. However, these additives could have significant effects on the viscoelastic properties of concrete. Existing models for predicting creep and drying shrinkage of concrete do not consider the effect of SCM/filler on the predicted values. This study evaluates existing creep and drying shrinkage models, including AASHTO LRFD, ACI209, CEB-FIP MC90-99, B3, and GL2000, for SCC mixtures with different SCMs/fillers. Forty SCC mixtures were proportioned for …