2 research outputs found
The practice of green procurement in facilities management in higher education institutions
No full textA research report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Building, 2020Applying sustainability principles in facilities management is vital as it assists in reducing and eliminating adverse impacts on the natural environment. Sustainability principles also have a significant impact in higher education institutions as they have numerous buildings on campuses. Several studies have confirmed that applying sustainability principles in facilities management can yield positive results such as water conservation, reduction of energy consumption and waste whilst increasing long term cost savings and producing green conducive environments. Green procurement is avital aspect of sustainability as it focuses on purchasing of environmentally friendly products and services. Therefore, green procurement practices are key in achieving sustainable facilities management. Even though literature exists regarding green procurement in facilities management, little is known about actual green procurement practices in facilities management in higher education institutions, the capacity to implement green procurement, knowledge of green procurement, readiness to implement green procurement and influencing factors faced in the quest to implement green procurement. The aim of the study was to identify the actual green procurement practices that are being implemented in facilities management in higher education institutions in South Africa. This study was carried out in the interpretivist philosophical manner. An inductive reasoning approach was utilised through the multi-method of semi-structured interviews and direct observations that was used in a survey strategy. The sampling methods used, was non-probability sampling. The findings of the study reveal that the current green procurement practices in the participating South African universities include energy efficiency, water conservation, innovative building designs, sustainable landscaping, building management systems, recycling of waste and energy efficiency on heating, ventilation and air conditioning. However, financial constraints were highlighted as an important factor influencing the level and frequency of green procurement implementationCK202
Numerical Simulations of Stokes Flow by the Iterations of Boundary Conditions and Finite Difference Methods
No full textMSc (Applied Mathematics)Mathematics and Applied Mathematics DepartmentIn this study the iteration of boundary conditions method (Chizhonkov and Kargin, 2006) is
used together with the well known Finite difference numerical method to solve the Stokes
problem over a rectangular domain as well as in irregular domain. The iteration of boundary
conditions method has been applied to the Stokes problem in a rectangular domain,
2
<x<
2
,
d
2
< y <
d
2
, by the above mentioned researchers. Our main task here is
to validate the results of the approximate methods by this analytical method in case of the
rectangular domain and extend that to the case of irregular domain.The (Chizhonkov and
Kargin, 2006) algorithm is typically the best choice for validation purposes because of its
high accuracy.
It is known in literature that increasing the parameter d, which represents the ratio of the
sides, leads to slow down in convergence of the approximate methods like the conjugate
Gradients of Uzawa (Kobelkov and Olshanskii, 2000). It is therefore important that an
algorithm that converges uniformly with respect to the parameter d is considered. The
(Chizhonkov and Kargin, 2006) algorithm is typical of such an algorithm, and hence our
choice of the method in this work.
In this project the non-homogeneous Stokes problem is transformed into a homogeneous
Stokes problem and the resulting problem is then decomposed into two sub problems that
are solvable by the eigenfunction expansion method. Once all necessary coefficients of the
generalised Fourier series are known and the functions describing the boundary conditions
are prescribed and represented in terms of the Fourier series, we then proceed to formulate
the iteration of boundary conditions numerical algorithm. Finally we develop a numerical
scheme, using the finite difference methods, for solving the problem in both rectangular and
irregular domains. Coding of the numerical algorithm is done using MATLAB 9.0,R2016a
programming language, and implemented by the author. The results of the two methods in
both cases of boundary conditions are then compared for validation of our purely numerical
results.NR
