SINTEF Open
Not a member yet
11374 research outputs found
Sort by
Ensuring ambitious goals: Barrier and good practices in the planning and building process
Get PDFBarriers and good practices in ambitious projects
How can we ensure good processes before, during and after the realization of a zero-emission area? How can we ensure that buildings are realized as intended? Why do we struggle with good intentions being lost in the process from early planning to completed construction?
With this report, we want to collect key findings from the literature in terms of barriers, challenges, best practices, and drivers in pursuing ZEN-like projects. The focus is on building processes in the context of projects with ambitious energy and environmental targets.
In the context of energy-efficient projects, hidden costs, split incentives, and inertia, are only a few of the constraints that ambitious projects must deal with, together with a lack of accountability of the actors after delivery, lack of knowledge and skills, poor communication and collaboration, lack of life cycle thinking, etc. They ultimately cause a gap between ambitions and actual delivery. Clear goals formulation, collaboration, closeness, involvement of stakeholders, and shared understanding/acceptance of the concept of Zero Emission Buildings by actors were some of the success factors in the pilots of the Research Centre on Zero Emission Buildings. However, the complexity rises significantly when we move to the district scale (like we do in the Research Centre on Zero Emission Neighbourhoods). Conceiving the development as a program of projects with a central coordinator seems a promising way forward to tackle the challenge of building carbon-neutral neighbourhoods. Many challenges persist, including uncertainties, interests mismatches, lack of knowledge of technical requirements and management processes.
The success of a project in terms of goal achievement is strictly related to a successful process. With the adoption of integrated design and Soft Landings strategies, the literature suggests the importance of collaboration, improvement of information flow, the rise of actors’ accountability in the aftercare, and acknowledgement of the users’ and Facility Manager’s perspectives since the design stage. With commissioning, they have the potential to bridge the gap between design goals/ambitions and the operational status of a building, delivering actual benefits. Their maintenance might also require new actors in the urban panorama (i.e., urban Facility Managers).
Organizational, contractual, and cultural aspects should then be revised and improved to build the proper environment for a project's success, deploying new tools and methods. Tools to enhance projects’ goals include quality assurance methods, early-stage simulation tools, information technologies, and extended reality technologies. With organizational strategies (e.g., Lean principles) and suitable contractual arrangements, they should support performance-based design and integrated project delivery, including integrated risk management, as a measure to ensure project success in terms of goal achievement.
In the fragmented and project-based Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry the adoption of tools is under its full potential because of technical, but also non-technical reasons. Most importantly, collaboration is still hindered, since diverse actors are coming together for a limited amount of time, with their own cultures, practices, and objectives. Lack of stakeholders’ collaboration and commitment, insufficient organizational processes, and unsupportive development frameworks are reasons for failure in reaching energy master plan goals at the neighbourhood level more than lack of technologies. Thus, the literature suggests that to increase the opportunities for a project’s success, the following actions/elements, among others, should be promoted:
• Exploration and implementation of collaborative frameworks and tools (including digital),
• Demanding and knowledgeable clients pursuing and following-up on ambitious goals under fair contract arrangements,
• Long-term relationships between actors to build trust and a ‘no-blame’ culture,
• Championing,
• Contracts as management tools,
• Early involvement of contractors and suppliers,
• Users’ involvement,
• Increasing knowledge across industries,
• Sharing of knowledge, information, risks, and rewards,
• Life cycle thinking and performance assessment tools,
• Building and maintenance of a project culture,
• Improvement of experts’ communication,
• Implementation of tools/practices to reduce conflicts.
Tools/recommendations are needed to untap the potential for integrated approaches in ZEN developments, and stakeholders’ engagement must be guaranteed by carefully evaluating and managing goals, values, and risks.publishedVersio
Raft Protocol for Fault Tolerance and Self-Recovery in Federated Learning
Get PDFFederated Learning (FL) has emerged as a decentralised machine learning paradigm for distributed systems, particularly in edge and IoT environments. However, ensuring fault tolerance and self-recovery in such scenarios remains challenging, because of the centralised model aggregation which acts as a single point of failure. A possible solution to this challenge would rely on the continuous replication of the global FL state across participating nodes and the functional suitability of any node to replace the aggregator in case of failures. These functional requirements can be implemented using one of the existing distributed consensus algorithm, such as Raft. Our approach utilises Raft's leader election and log replication mechanisms to enable automatic stateful recovery after failures and thus to improve fault tolerance. The log replication process efficiently maintains consistency and coherence across distributed FL nodes, ensuring uninterrupted training process and model convergence. This enhances the robustness of the overall FL system, especially in dynamic and unreliable cyber-physical conditions. To demonstrate the viability of our approach, we present a proof-of-concept implementation based on the existing FL framework Flower. We conduct a series of experiments to measure the aggregator re-election time and traffic overheads associated with the state replication. Despite the expected traffic overheads growing with the number of FL nodes, the results demonstrate a resilient self-recovering system capable of withstanding node failures while maintaining model consistency.publishedVersio
Reliability Assessment Combining Importance Resampling and the Cross Entropy Method
Get PDFpublishedVersio
REBUS project (2020–2023). Final report
Get PDFREBUS project vision and objectives: The research project REBUS – REuse of Building materials – a USer perspective started in 2020 with a vision of developing a knowledge platform to enable the wider and more efficient implementation of reusable building materials. REBUS aimed to address the main barriers to reuse in the construction sector using research-based approach by identifying the need of different user groups (WP1), develop methods for assessing the technical performance (WP2) and sustainability of reuse products (WP3), and practical knowledge exchange from actual pilots (WP4) and use of network strategies (WP5).
Basic facts about REBUS: The REBUS project was an interdisciplinary collaboration between SINTEF, Inland Norway University of Applied Science, FutureBuilt, Resirqel, and Boligbygg Oslo KF from Norway, Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg university in Denmark (BUILD), and IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute. The project was financed by the Research Council of Norway under the program Miljøforsk (grant number 302754), and in-kind contributions of industry partners, who provided their expertise and resources.
Main activities and results: The project started by screening the reuse potential of more than 50 construction product groups. This was done through input from experts from SINTEF as well as discussions in a series of workshops with REBUS partners (WP1). From this assess-ment, five construction products were chosen to be considered in REBUS: paving stone, doors and windows, glass partition wall, ventilation components, and sanitary equipment. To get more practical knowledge, the technical, environmental, and economic performance of reused paving stone was evaluated through laboratory testing, life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) studies (WP2). A reuse guideline was then developed for the remaining four products (doors and windows, glass partition walls, ventilation components and sanitary equipment) giving advice to consultants, developers, and contractors on how to assess and document the properties of reusable building materials (WP2).
To understand the challenges, motivations, and potential measures for driving different user groups to reuse building materials in Norway, a national survey (WP1 & WP5) was conducted. In addition, semi-structured interviews (WP1 & WP4) were conducted with various actors in the building industry to identify practical challenges, barriers, and success factors related to the reuse of construction products in Norwegian pilot projects. To gather more practical know-ledge on the reuse of construction materials, a comparative assessment of exemplary pilot projects from Norway, Denmark, and Belgium was conducted (WP1 &WP4). Moreover, a review of approaches to reuse of building materials was conducted through evaluation of the current state of circularity in the Norwegian building industry, including actors, approaches, and developments (WP4).
To address the research gap on the lack of harmonized life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) methods, a LCSA framework was developed (WP3). The framework was developed harmonizing environmental life cycle assessment (LCA), social LCA and life cycle costing (LCC) assessment methods to enable transparently assess the potential environmental, social and/or cost impacts of reused products in comparison to new ones.
A network strategy was used to facilitate exchange of knowledge developed through REBUS as well as the experiences of partners and other key players within the network members (WP5). This exchange of ideas and insights served as a valuable input to providing recommendations on how procurement and political instruments can affect sustainable reuse of building products.
The findings from REBUS project were made accessible to a wider audience through various channels aimed to achieve the ambition of creating research-based knowledge (WP6). Specifically, the project results were published in three peer-reviewed journals, one book chapter, and three reports and communicated through popular scientific articles, presentations at different events, webinars, and seminars.
Expected impacts:
• The research-based knowledge on reuse of existing construction products from different user aspects through a national survey, interviews, and comparative assessment of exem-plary pilots from Norway, Denmark and Belgium can provide a better understanding of the status of reuse for different actors.
• The research on the technical performance of reused paving stone, through actual map-ping, laboratory testing, LCA and LCC analysis can provide guidance for further develop-ment of testing, documentation, environmental and economic analysis of reusable pro-ducts. Moreover, the reuse guidance document demonstrated how existing methods can be used to test and document reusable products, which can serve as a good example for developing routines for testing and documentation of reused products.
• The LCSA framework developed through REBUS can support transparent evaluation of the environmental, social, and/or economic impacts and benefits of reused products in comparison to new products.
• The review of material reuse approach and the practical knowledge collected from pilot projects can give better insight into historical developments as well as perspectives of professional actors involved in the limited pilot projects.
• The network established through REBUS helped to contribute towards influencing the participants’ attitudes and actions for reuse of building materials.
• Furthermore, the results from REBUS contribute to several of the UN sustainable develop-ment goals including: SDG12 (Responsible production and consumption), SDG13 (Climate action), SDG14 (Life below water), SDG15 (Life on land), SDG11 (Sustainable cities and communities), SDG8 (Decent work and economic growth), and SDG9 (Indust-ries, innovation, and infrastructure).publishedVersio
Nanoscale silicate melt textures determine volcanic ash surface chemistry
Get PDFExplosive volcanic eruptions produce vast quantities of silicate ash, whose surfaces are subsequently altered during atmospheric transit. These altered surfaces mediate environmental interactions, including atmospheric ice nucleation, and toxic effects in biota. A lack of knowledge of the initial, pre-altered ash surface has required previous studies to assume that the ash surface composition created during magmatic fragmentation is equivalent to the bulk particle assemblage. Here we examine ash particles generated by controlled fragmentation of andesite and find that fragmentation generates ash particles with substantial differences in surface chemistry. We attribute this disparity to observations of nanoscale melt heterogeneities, in which Fe-rich nanophases in the magmatic melt deflect and blunt fractures, thereby focusing fracture propagation within aureoles of single-phase melt formed during diffusion-limited growth of crystals. In this manner, we argue that commonly observed pre-eruptive microtextures caused by disequilibrium crystallisation and/or melt unmixing can modify fracture propagation and generate primary discrepancies in ash surface chemistry, an essential consideration for understanding the cascading consequences of reactive ash surfaces in various environments.publishedVersio
The REPowerEU policy’s impact on the Nordic power system
Get PDFEnergy system models provide us with scenarios for the future energy system, supporting our understanding of the impact of societal changes and adopted policies. To front-load the EU’Fit for 55’ package for 2030 and targets of replacing imported natural gas with renewable electricity, the Nordic countries could contribute by exporting additional electricity to mainland Europe. This paper describes a comparative study including five energy system models – GENeSYS-MOD, ON-TIMES, IFE-TIMES-Norway, highRES, and IntERACT, exploring two decarbonisation scenarios leading up to 2050. The scenarios involved simulating an additional 30 TWh electricity export requirement from 2030. Key findings include Denmark and Norway emerging as major net exporters, with Denmark covering over 60% of the additional export. The models predict that 76%–82% of the new electricity production will come from wind power, split between onshore and offshore installations, highlighting significant investment requirements. These results underscore the Nordic countries’ capacity to support the EU’s renewable energy targets, with wind power being pivotal. This research offers a broad overview over different modelling tools and their behaviour and provides critical insights for policymakers, stressing the need for coordinated Nordic efforts to maximise the benefits of increased electricity exports while ensuring energy system stability and cost-efficiency.The REPowerEU policy’s impact on the Nordic power systempublishedVersio
Determining Moisture Content of Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL)
Get PDFWooden load-bearing structures are becoming more common as an eco-friendly alternative to steel and concrete in large buildings. In these buildings, laminated veneer lumber (LVL) is increasingly used in structural building elements, particularly in the flanges of wooden I-beams. However, as for all products made from wood, proper moisture control is important to ensure the long-term integrity of the elements. The purpose of this study is to investigate the moisture properties of LVL and the correlation between moisture sensor readings and the actual moisture content determined from accurate weighing of the samples. Laboratory measurements were made of two different wooden materials using 20 identical sensors. The test was conducted on samples of LVL flanges delivered by the Norwegian wood production company Hunton, and on samples of pine lumber. The moisture sensors were delivered by Omnisense. For the LVL samples, the test results show that the resistance values given by the resistance method were too high compared to the more accurate gravimetric method. Conversely, the measured values were too low for the pine samples. LVL also had a faster moisture sorption than pine under the same moisture conditions. The glue between the veneer layers affects the electric conductivity of the wood in LVL and interrupts the readings. The glue might also affect the moisture sorption.publishedVersio
Bravent - Kontrollplan
No full textDette notatet er en delleveranse i arbeidspakke WP3 i prosjektet BRAVENT – Effektiv ventilasjon av røyk fra små branner. Notatet med tilhørende vedlegg Kontrollplan gir en beskrivelse av hvordan periodisk kontroll og daglig/ukentlig internkontroll av ventilasjonsanleggets funksjon under brann i skolebygg kan utføres. Kontrollplanen kan også være nyttig for bruk i andre offentlige formålsbygg
Zero-Emission Rail in Czechia: Techno-economic analysis of lines R14, R21, R22, R25, R26, R27, SP14, U28
Get PDFThis report analyses several representative regional, non-electrified rail lines in Czechia and evaluates different zero-emission technologies for their electrification: hydrogen, batteries, partial and full catenary. Single-train simulations are set up for every line to calculate energy requirements and state-of-charge profiles for batteries; the resulting data is fed into a detailed techno-economic analysis to rank the technologies. The results indicate that some lines are best served by hydrogen, other ones by batteries, which in some cases may be cheaper than diesel operation overall; catenary electrification (predictably, as these are all non-electrified lines) is always far more expensive.Zero-Emission Rail in Czechia: Techno-economic analysis of lines R14, R21, R22, R25, R26, R27, SP14, U28ISBN: 978-82-14-07242-6publishedVersio
The Quest for the Comprehensive Customer Journey - A Case Study from a C2C Marketplace
Get PDFBookis is a C2C online marketplace for physical books. It is a product-orientated platform on web and mobile apps that enables customers to buy used books from other customers on the platform. Insights into the customer behavior and how customers experience their customer journey is crucial to improve their marketplace. Service providers, such as Bookis, are accumulating more and more data from their systems that could be leveraged for analysis. Yet, turning such data into comprehensive individual customer journeys is a significant challenge. This difficulty is compounded by several issues among which: (1) converting or connecting raw events to discernible touchpoints, (2) defining the boundaries of journeys in a C2C marketplace, and (3) acquiring and integrating data from external service providers such as delivery services. We provide a case study describing two analysis iterations in an attempt to obtain a comprehensive view on Bookis’ main customer journey by combining an “outside in” view (mystery shopping) with an “inside out” view (process mining). We leverage a novel event knowledge graph approach to data integration and conclude that the combination of both viewpoints is important to obtain a comprehensive analysis of the customer journey. In particular, relevant parts of the journey may not be covered by data-driven method, despite the large amounts of event data available.acceptedVersio