Engineers are always interested in the worst-case scenario. One of the most important and challenging missions of structural engineers may be to narrow the range of unexpected incidents in building structural design. Redundancy, robustness and resilience play an important role in such circumstances. "Improving the Earthquake Resilience of Buildings: The worst case approach" discusses the importance of worst-scenario approach for improved earthquake resilience of buildings and nuclear reactor facilities.

"Improving the Earthquake Resilience of Buildings: The worst case approach" consists of two parts. The first part deals with the characterization and modeling of worst or critical ground motions on inelastic structures and the related worst-case scenario in the structural design of ordinary simple building structures. The second part of the book focuses on investigating the worst-case scenario for passively controlled and base-isolated buildings. This allows for detailed consideration of a range of topics including:

A consideration of damage of building structures in the critical excitation method for improved building-earthquake resilience,

A consideration of uncertainties of structural parameters in structural control and base-isolation for improved building-earthquake resilience, and

New insights in structural design of super high-rise buildings under long-period ground motions.

"Improving the Earthquake Resilience of Buildings: The worst case approach" is a valuable resource for researchers and engineers interested in learning and applying the worst-case scenario approach in the seismic-resistant design for more resilient structures.

Effective 1 July 2013. This edition is updated in the light of the European Construction Products Regulations 2011, and particularly confirms the requirement that building products covered by a harmonised European standard should normally have CE marking. Guidance on resistance to moisture and substances in the subsoil has been deleted as it is in Approved Document C, as have examples of materials susceptible to changes in their properties. This Approved Document has a fresh new look and has been totally re-designed into a single column format to make reading. It has also been subject to a thorough editorial review to make the text/content more reader-friendly and simpler to assimilate and understand. Contracts and Management Publications Update Service: To ensure that you have the most up-to-date Approved Document or Amendment to an Approved Document to hand, you can now join our CAMPUS service. RIBA Bookshops will automatically send you copies of new releases as and when they are published. Visit our CAMPUS page for further details.

All the cost data you need to keep your estimating accurate, competitive and profitable.Do you work on jobs between 50 and 50,000? - Then this book is for you.Specially written for contractors and small businesses carrying out small works, Spon's Estimating Cost Guide to Plumbing and Heating contains accurate information on thousands of rates each broken down to labour, material overheads and profit.The first book to include typical project costs for: rainwater goods installations bathrooms external waste systems central heating systems hot and cold water systems.

Specifically written for contractors and small businesses carrying out small works, this second edition of Spon's Estimating Cost Guide to Small Groundworks, Landscaping Work and Gardening contains accurate information on thousands of rates, each broken down to labour, material overheads and profit.This is the first book to focus on this range of external work, including garden maintenance work on blocks of flats and individual houses, schools and sports fields, garden makeovers, laying patios and paths, small land drainage schemes on farmland, and small-scale local authority maintenance work.

All the cost data you need to keep your estimating accurate, competitive and profitable. Do you work on jobs between 50 and 50,000? Then this book is for you. Specially written for contractors, quantity surveyors and clients carrying out small works, this book contains accurate information on thousands of rates each broken down to labour, material overheads and profit.More than just a price book, it gives easy-to-read professional advice on setting up and running a business.

This timely volume presents a range of critical topics on the use of composite materials in civil engineering; industrial, commercial, and residential structures; and historic buildings. Structural strengthening techniques based on composite materials, including, but not limited to, fiber-reinforced polymers, fiber-reinforced glasses, steel-reinforced polymers, and steel-reinforced glasses represent a practice employed internationally and have become an important component in the restoration of buildings impacted by natural hazards and other destructive forces. "New Composite Materials: Selection, Design, and Application" stands as a highly relevant and diverse effort, distinct from other technical publications dealing with building issues. The book focuses extensively on characterization of techniques employed for structural restoration and examines in detail an assortment of materials such as concrete, wood, masonry, and steel.

This book presents cutting-edge work on the energy efficiency and environmental sustainability of buildings, examining EU policies, regulations and technologies for complex systems such as passive buildings, sustainable buildings and, as part of the Energy Performance of Building Directive (EPBD), nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEB) requirements. It explores a wide range of topics, including indoor environment requirements, building physics, in-situ experiments to determine the thermal properties of buildings, nZEB requirements, building service technology, and methods of evaluating energy efficiency and environmental impacts. It also provides an overview of the best available technologies for nZEB, including those for the rational use of energy, utilization of renewable energy sources, EPBD systems and calculation methods. This book is a valuable resource for students, researchers and practitioners of urban planning, and architecture, civil and mechanical engineering.

This book provide a series of designs, materials, characterization and modeling, that will help create safer and stronger structures in coastal areas. The authors take a look at the different materials (porous, heterogeneous, concrete...), the moisture transfers in construction materials as well as the degradation caused by external attacks and put forth systems to monitor the structures or evaluate the performance reliability as well as degradation scenarios of coastal protection systems.

This is the Proceedings of the International Workshop Heritagebot 2017 that was held in Cassino, Italy in September 2017. The papers cover a wide range of disciplines connected with Cultural Heritage, from humanistic fields up to engineering designs through legal aspects and financial/economical studies, treating aspects of theory, design, practice and applications. Topics addressed during the conference were: business models and business planning; creative cities and industries; documentation, analysis and survey of cultural heritage; economics of cultural heritage; cultural heritage, business and organizational models; cultural heritage and collaborative digital systems; citizen science for cultural heritage: service robotics for cultural heritage; legal tools for the development and innovation management in cultural heritage; capital budgeting and capital structure of cultural heritage sector; field applications in cultural heritage.

This book approaches cultural landscape as a driver for societal challenges, economic development, social inclusion, place assessment and heritage conservation. It explores issues stemming from the relation between conservation and emergencies, and identifies descriptive tools for conveying knowledge and generating new expertise, heritage skills, seismic culture and social resilience. The documentation of landscapes, due in part to new technologies, increasingly involves integrated methodologies and graphic outcomes such as Heritage-BIM, advanced 3D modeling, and immersive environments. According to recent UNESCO recommendations, the process of mapping places is a necessary prerequisite for design action, and also includes the emotional and perceptive dimension, so as to represent space through visual thought and produce graphic materials. The chapters presented here will ultimately support efforts to overcome the emergency phase of reconstruction after natural disasters and, by exploring relevant issues in recent studies, will describe emerging tools that can help inspire practices that concern not only agrarian and urban, but also historic urban landscapes. The work also presents planning tools to help preserve the integrity and authenticity of urban heritages. The book will benefit all scholars and practitioners who are involved in the process of understanding, designing and transforming places, and will foster an international exchange of research, case studies, and best practices to confront the practical challenges involved in keeping cultural landscapes alive.

This volume presents a history of heavy timber construction (HTC) in the United States, chronicling nearly two centuries of building history, from inception to a detailed evaluation of one of the best surviving examples of the type, with an emphasis on fire resistance. The book does not limit itself in scope to serving only as a common history. Rather, it provides critical analysis of HTC in terms of construction methods, design, technical specifications, and historical performance under fire conditions. As such, this book provides readers with a truly comprehensive understanding and exploration of heavy timber construction in the United States and its performance under fire conditions.

"Energy Efficient Thermal Management of Data Centers" examines energy flow in today's data centers. Particular focus is given to the state-of-the-art thermal management and thermal design approaches now being implemented across the multiple length scales involved. The impact of future trends in information technology hardware, and emerging software paradigms such as cloud computing and virtualization, on thermal management are also addressed. The book explores computational and experimental characterization approaches for determining temperature and air flow patterns within data centers. Thermodynamic analyses using the second law to improve energy efficiency are introduced and used in proposing improvements in cooling methodologies. Reduced-order modeling and robust multi-objective design of next generation data centers are discussed.

This book presents an in-depth analysis covering climatic and weather conditions, house and building development history, construction methods and technologies, and environmental conditions. It provides relevant house and building information and highlights recent advances in hot and humid regions, as well as developments in other regions that are relevant to hot and humid climates. The countries in hot and humid regions, which include the tropical countries, the Middle Eastern countries around the Mediterranean, and many countries of Central Asia and Africa, are home to some of the most challenging conditions in the world in terms of house and building design and construction, and in terms of maintaining indoor thermal comfort and air quality in an energy-efficient way. The book's respective chapters, prepared by expert contributors, cover essential concepts, designs, and construction methodologies for houses and commercial buildings. As such, the book offers a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate students in architecture and engineering, house and building designers, and building sciences researchers. Building contractors, manufacturers and distributors of building equipment and devices, and government policymakers and legislators will also benefit from the information provided in this book.

Strain Hardening Cement Composites, SHCC hereafter, demonstrate excellent mechanical behavior showing tensile strain hardening and multiple fine cracks. This strain hardening behavior improves the durability of concrete structures employing SHCC and the multiple fine cracks enhance structural performance. Reliable tensile performance of SHCC enables us to design structures explicitly accounting for SHCC's tensile properties. Reinforced SHCC elements (R/SHCC) indicate large energy absorbing performance under large seismic excitation. Against various types of loads, R/SHCC elements can be designed by superimposing re-bar performance and SHCC's tensile performance. This report focuses on flexural design, shear design, FE modeling and anti-seismic design of R/SHCC elements as well as application examples. Establishing design methods for new materials usually leads to exploring application areas and this trend should be demonstrated by collecting actual application examples of SHCC in structures.

This book, Drying and Wetting of Building Materials and Components, provides a collection of recent contributions in the field of drying and wetting in porous building materials.
The main benefit of the book is that it discusses some of the most important topics related to the drying and wetting processes, namely, innovations and trends in drying science and technology, drying mechanism and theory, equipment, advanced modelling, complex simulation and experimentation. At the same time, these topics will be going to the encounter of a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines.
The book is divided in several chapters that intend to be a resume of the current state of knowledge for benefit of professional colleagues.

This book reports on cutting-edge technologies that have been fostering sustainable development in a variety of fields, including built and natural environments, structures, energy, advanced mechanical technologies as well as electronics and communication technologies. It reports on the applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Internet-of-Things, predictive maintenance, as well as modeling and control techniques to reduce the environmental impacts of buildings, enhance their environmental contribution and positively impact the social equity. The different chapters, selected on the basis of their timeliness and relevance for an audience of engineers and professionals, describe the major trends in the field of sustainable engineering research, providing them with a snapshot of current issues together with important technical information for their daily work, as well as an interesting source of new ideas for their future research. The works included in this book were selected among the contributions to the BUE ACE1, the first event, held in Cairo, Egypt, on 8-9 November 2016, of a series of Annual Conferences & Exhibitions (ACE) organized by the British University in Egypt (BUE).

Post-occupancy evaluation, focusing on building's occupants and their needs, provides insight into the consequences of past design decisions and forms a sound basis for creating better buildings in the future. This book, first published in 1988, includes a review of the evolution of the field, a conceptual frame-work for POE, and pragmatic information on planning, conducting, and reporting POEs. Post-Occupancy Evaluation categorizes the approaches to building evaluation by describing the three levels of POE effort - indicative, investigative, and diagnostic, each differing in terms of time, resources, and personnel needed. In its scope Post-Occupancy Evaluation is both comprehensive and specific; professionals in the design and planning disciplines will find it an invaluable resource for understanding the theory behind POE's and the procedures needed to put the theory into practice.

This book gives information on non destructive techniques for assessment of concrete structures. It synthesizes the best of international knowledge about what techniques can be used for assessing material properties (strength) and structural properties (geometry, defects...). It describes how the techniques can be used so as to answer a series of usual questions, highlighting their capabilities and limits, and providing advices for a better use of techniques. It also focuses on possible combinations of techniques so as to improve the assessment. It is based on many illustrative examples and give in each case references to standards and guidelines.

Degradation, the chemical/physical response of building and con struction materials exposed to in-service environments, must be predicted prior to their installation in structures if materials are to be effectively selected, used and maintained. These assessments of materials degradation require that methods be available to aid prediction of service life. The objectives of building materials science are a) to charac terize and categorize materials, b) to predict, preferably in a mathematical sense, material or component response including expected service life, and c) to make improvements in material response through improvements in design, formulation, processing or specification. For building and construction materials, continued progress has been made towards objective (a), but little progress has been made towards objectives (b) and (c). Of these, the mathematical prediction of service life appears to be of greater importance, because, if general approaches or models having application to a wide range of building and construction materials can be identi fied, then the categorization, selection, use and improvement of materials can proceed in a systematic manner. Researchers in advanced technologies, such as aerospace, nuclear, electronics and medicine, have apparently been more successful than researchers in building and construction technology in responding to the need for reliable predictions of service life.