Civil Engineering Dimension (E-Journal)
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Global Multidisciplinary Learning in Construction Education: Lessons from Virtual Collaboration of Building Design Teams
Get PDFConstruction is a multidisciplinary activity in which effective communication between parties is essential for successful construction projects. However, the construction industry has been characterised by fragmentation, which prevents seamless communication. This problem has been further exacerbated by the need to communicate over distance within a time constraint in an increasingly interconnected and globalised construction sector. This has brought a particular challenge to the education sector in preparing the future graduates to work in this context. The paper reports on an on-going Hewlett Packard-sponsored project to implement an innovative learning approach which consists of distanced collaboration between students from different disciplines from two Universities in the UK and Canada. The empirical work involved interviews and questionnaire survey at different stages of the project. The preliminary findings reveal the impact of disciplinary training on the development of effective virtual collaboration, although this has been moderated, to some extent, by their earlier (not so positive) experience during the course of the project. The research provides a material for further reflection and may serve as a useful consideration for future development of a guiding framework for effective training of built environment professionals
Selecting Materials for Environmental-Friendly Buildings: The Need for Improved Environmental Impact Data
Get PDFBuildings of the future need to be more environmental-friendly. Selecting environmentally-benign materials in design stage would partly help achieving such goal. Examination of existing environmental impact data of building materials reveals that the data differ greatly from one source to another. Comparisons of environmental impact values of selected materials are presented. The sources that give rise to data variation are identified and discussed. The applicability of existing data is assessed from the designers’ perspective. Limitations of current practice in data acquisition and presentation are also discussed. It is concluded that existing environmental impact data of building materials are inconsistent and perplexing to designers. An alternative approach to data acquisition and presentation is to break the life cycle of building materials into several phases and to calculate the total impact value as the sum of the impacts of all phases. This would make the determination of the full life cycle value feasible and increase external validity of research results
Safe and Sustainable Tall Buildings - State of the Art
Get PDFTall buildings are becoming very popular around the world. Asia will have most of the tall buildings in this century. Both safety and sustainability aspects are important in planning and designing these buildings. The design and construction of tall buildings present many challenges for the design team, from engineers, architect through to the builder. Although structural systems could be developed and construction solutions could be found to design and construct very tall buildings in excess of 1 km (even 1 mile), other aspects such as fire and egress, long-term movements, environmental wind and perception of motion (including damping for dynamic effects), transportation (lifts) issues, sustainability, durability and maintenance will govern and may even restrict the heights. Current practices and important issues related to design of safe and sustainable design of tall buildings are discussed in this paper
A Simple Technique to Determine Interface Slip of Stud Connected SCC Girders
Get PDFA simple technique is proposed to compute interface slip of stud connected steel-concrete composite (SCC) girders based on the results of a flexure test. The technique makes use of relative longitudinal displacement of the concrete slab and steel beam to calculate the interface slip. In the flexure test of a SCC girder, a cost-effective instrumentation arrangement consisting of mechanical dial gauges is used to measure the relative longitudinal displacement. Responses measured from experiments on SCC girders conducted by the authors are used for numerical implementation and validation of the technique. Alternatively, interface slip is also evaluated by applying an analytical model which is based on first principles of mechanics. The values of interface slip computed by using the proposed technique are found to have close correlation with those of the analytical model. The effect of edge restraint on slip due to friction between steel and concrete is also studied
Assessing Risk Management Capability of Public Sector Organizations Related to PPP Scheme Development for Water Supply in Indonesia
Get PDFThe success of Public Private Partnership (PPP) for water supply investment is inseparable from the capability of risk management of the parties within the project. This study investigates the risk management capability of Indonesian local public sector organizations that are potentially involved in PPP schemes for water supply. A risk management maturity model based assessment tool probing the culture, process, experience, application and partnership aspects is used in the survey. The model describes risk management capability in four levels (ad-hoc, initial, competent, excellent). The survey shows that their risk management capability is still in-average at the initial stage (level 2), meaning that the adopted risk management postures are mostly supported only by unstructured, ad-hoc and non-formal processes. The result of this study can help decision makers in choosing appropriate risk management methods and tools to be used by the local public authorities for managing risks in PPP schemes
The Effectiveness of Emergency Response System’s Service Providers for Road Accidents in Johor Bahru, Malaysia
Get PDFIn Malaysia, there are three core services involved in emergency, namely the fire and rescue, police, and ambulance services. The aim of the service providers is to prevent the loss of life and damage by improving their response time. The Civil Defence Department and the 999 call centre also assist the main providers. This paper aims to provide an overview of emergency response system (ERS) for road accidents in Johor Bahru. The objective is to find the effective services from ERS works. There are three sections of chronological events involved: the call centre receiving reports on accidents, at location of the accident and the time during which the victims are brought to the hospital. The paper studies the operation scheme of the ERS by describing the condition; to analyse the questionnaire using a set of questions on the ERS service; and to determine the effectiveness of the services provided. The provider’s services can be identified as a main factor in improving the ERS services provided in the study area
Limitations in Simplified Approach in Assessing Performance of Façade under Blast Pressures
Get PDFThe main function of building facades, which often consists of glazing windows, is to provide protection to the occupants and contents of the building from external hazards. In a blast event, the facade component of a building may become the weakest link of the structure, whereby its breach may lead to blast pressure ingress and hazardous projectiles into a structure. This paper reports part of a study to establish the performance of glass windows under blast pressures. Two modelling techniques were used to simulate the response of a façade panel. They are the Single Degree of Freedom (SDOF) modelling technique and the Finite Element (FE) modelling technique. Although the SDOF approach can be used with a reasonable degree of accuracy, the limitations of its basic assumption lead to loss of details in the idealisation process. This paper presents an attempt to establish performance indices of a façade panel, and to identify the discrepancies between simplified approach and the detailed numerical modelling approach analysis
Soil Liquefaction in Padang due to Padang Earthquake 30September 2009
Get PDFThe Padang earthquake of M7.6 on 30 September 2009 (30S’09) caused damage to buildings, houses, public water facilities, and road ways. Several buildings were damaged due to liquefaction. This paper describes the liquefaction potential in Padang based on the site observation and analytical examination. The liquefaction was observed at a number of sites including roadway, river bank and play ground. The samples of sand boils were sent to the laboratory to determine the soil grain size distributions. It is found that the fine-sand (diameter less than 0.4 mm) content of the liquefied soil samples is more than 65%. This type of soils satisfies the criteria of liquefaction susceptibility. Based on the field soil test data, the liquefaction potential of sites is also examined. The results show that the observed locations have liquefaction potential
Generalized Fragility Relationships with Local Site Conditions for Probabilistic Performance-based Seismic Risk Assessment of Bridge Inventories
No full textThe current practice of detailed seismic risk assessment cannot be easily applied to all the bridges in a large transportation networks due to limited resources. This paper presents a new approach for seismic risk assessment of large bridge inventories in a city or national bridge network based on the framework of probabilistic performance based seismic risk assessment. To account for the influences of local site effects, a procedure to generate site-specific hazard curves that includes seismic hazard microzonation information has been developed for seismic risk assessment of bridge inventories. Simulated ground motions compatible with the site specific seismic hazard are used as input excitations in nonlinear time history analysis of representative bridges for calibration. A normalizing procedure to obtain generalized fragility relationships in terms of structural characteristic parameters of bridge span and size and longitudinal and transverse reinforcement ratios is presented. The seismic risk of bridges in a large inventory can then be easily evaluated using the normalized fragility relationships without the requirement of carrying out detailed nonlinear time history analysis