Advanced Technologies for Sustainable Systems

This paper presents an introduction to structural demolition engineering as applied to steel structures. This work flows out of a research project aimed at providing design techniques for ensuring that structures can be both safely and efficiently demolished when they reach the end of their lifecycles. When a structure is to be demolished or imploded it is typically weakened such that when the collapse is triggered the collapse mechanism can be controlled and will occur as predicted. If structures are not weakened enough they may not collapse when required, but if weakened too much they could collapse prematurely killing demolition teams. This paper specifically discusses (a) a step-by-step analysis of the full-scale demolition of a large structure that the author filmed, explaining the structural mechanics of the system, and then (b) presents methods for weakening structures and how this influences failures. By providing verifiable methods for ensuring structural capacity, rather than relying on experience alone, the demolition process can become more efficient, leading to the increased recyclability of structures and a safer working environment.

The preservation of important cultural collections in museums, galleries, libraries etc. provides a legacy for future generations to research and experience their heritage. Guidance and standards for the design of archival storage facilities have typically focused on the provision of a controlled, unfluctuating internal environment. However, the latest revision of PD5454 “Guide for the storage and exhibition of archival materials” published by the British Standards Institution encourages designers to consider passive design approaches to reduce energy consumption. This paper reviews the key elements of the PD5454 document relevant to the environmental design of archives, and temperature stability metrics are proposed for assessing alternative passive design options. Analysis of a case study building designed by Atkins is used to illustrate the application of the proposed metrics. The paper concludes by considering issues to consider for the future development of thermal performance metrics for archives.

Informed retrofitting and maintenance is recognised as a cornerstone of sustainable heritage buildings. Clients and the construction team are concerned with the delivery of projects that are within the timescale, budget, as well as energy efficient and environmentally friendly. Indeed, they are increasingly being challenged to deliver sustainability performance of heritage projects. Employer Information Requirements (EIR) is now seen as essential for in any successful heritage building delivery. When designing a sustainable BIM project it has to be made sure that a complete and comprehensive EIR is delivered at the beginning of the project, in order to be able to produce a sustainable and energy efficient building, the EIR has to assure delivery of a full package of sustainable requirements for the construction project team, which in turn will allow them to produce a complete and correct BIM Execution Plan (BEP) that will be the basis upon which the whole construction process and definition of roles and responsibilities will be based. This paper discusses the design and development of an Ontology-based, BIM-enabled framework for EIR, which will support clients of smart-heritage projects to define their requirements in terms of sustainability. It will investigate the innovative approaches and methods used to produce a complete, correct, and comprehensive EIR. This framework will enable the heritage team to capture, analyse, and translate these requirements and convert them into constructional terms understood by all stakeholders, which covers all aspects needed to produce a smart-heritage project. The intention of this study is to save time, effort and cost, and in the same time provide an informed basis for delivering a successful project.

Building Information Modeling provides a solid ground for historical areas documentation, where a virtual experience of historic buildings is digitally constructed in order to maintain the built environment through its entire lifecycle. Jeddah Old Balad area, especially “Old Hajj Road”, is considered to be the core of heritage preservation. Therefore, this paper elaborates on a platform demonstrating the potential of combining big data for main corridor in Old Balad by using GIS server; In addition to people reflections within outdoor spaces via smart sensors while experiencing the variety of urban features of the area. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to give an overview of people responsiveness, as well as surveying and representation of spacious data in order to support the process of further integration between HBIM and GIS tools to maximize the use of built heritage resources used for creating, conserving, documenting, and managing information which has a great impact on touristic and commercial activities within the case of Qabel Street. The study aims to strengthen the relation between sustainable developments in this area within the explicit constraints of architectural heritage preservation.

This paper examines: smart buildings as part of ‘smart cities’; the particular challenges of heritage buildings; whether smart heritage buildings have any specific characteristics; the lack of data to inform appropriate refurbishment and retrofit; the emerging potential of technologies to engage people in acquiring that data and build bridges towards smart heritage, so easing the task of sustaining heritage buildings for the benefit of current and future generations; and ‘Living Labs’ as a key enabler. It is increasingly argued that there is a need to involve citizens in city development, so urban areas may be rendered more suitable to their needs and social problems be prevented. Meanwhile it is held that the value and significance of Heritage buildings and landscapes needs to be maintained, despite increasing pressures to adapt all building stock to address climate change and reduce increasingly expensive energy use. To convincingly engage citizens, such adaptation needs to enhance rather than reduce quality of life for users. Over the last decade there has been a move to repeated post-occupancy evaluation (POE), including some heritage building stocks, to ensure these goals continue to be achieved. Yet it can be argued that the number of such POE studies is limited by shortages of expertise, to the extent that in most cases we still lack sufficient data about the existing building stock, and in particular Heritage buildings, to make reliably informed judgements on suitable adaptation and mitigation measures. Simultaneously the sustainable transformation of Heritage buildings and landscapes into Smart Heritage can be held to be a key component in the metamorphosis of existing cities into Smart Cities. Thus this paper examines how Living Lab processes of engagement may deliver innovative approaches to POE, and thus support the scaling and speeding up of the transformation of Heritage into Smart Heritage.

Green rating systems act as tools to support the decision making process for sustainable plans and actions. They provide guidelines and assessment methods to achieve sustainable performance along projects’ lifecycle. This study investigates the application of SITES rating system to draw sustainable rehabilitation plans for Giza Zoo, which is considered one of the oldest and largest public parks in the Middle East. This comes as a response to the initiative of the Egyptian foreign alliance to rehabilitate Giza Zoo. The result of the study draws three scenarios for sustainable rehabilitation plans according to SITES checklist; in case of obtaining maximum, minimum and average points. Comparing between those three scenarios presents a preliminary assessment for the sustainable rehabilitation plan for Giza Zoo. This is developed to draw a preliminary project management framework incorporating sustainable rehabilitation practices along the project life cycle.

Information era have brought out several technologies that have added a lot into heritage buildings, starting from documentation technologies, virtual presentation technologies, in addition to various dissemination techniques and technologies that connect the public with heritage buildings and spaces. Never the less, HBIM technologies have provided more depth in dealing with heritage buildings in the scope of efficiency, retrofitting in addition to management. All the previous smart technologies have dealt with tangible aspect of heritage providing a physical reading for buildings and spaces. This paper deals with the results of the use of technology in recording and documenting archaeological heritage buildings and the extent of its success in its goals, including the reading of history through the building to check the logic of the argument of Ebn Rushed in his book ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, where he argues that: “ If one looks into a made of any manufactures without perceiving the wisdom behind such made and the purpose intended, and if it does not stand originally with such wisdom one might think it is possible that there are so made, which agreed in any form and any quantity agreed and put any agreed-volume and in whatever order.” Such argument will be investigated through the analysis of a case study with a proposed methodology to assess the results of retrofitting heritage buildings with the consideration of intangible historical aspects rather than tangible physical aspects alone.

Since the emergence of the concept of user-generated content websites—Web 2.0, Internet communications have developed as a powerful personal and social phenomenon. Many Internet applications have become partially or entirely related to the concept of social network; and cyberspace has become a space about ‘us’ not ‘where’ we are. This paper investigates the theoretical grounds of the effect of cyber experience on changing the individuals’ uses of the public spaces, and sustaining this change through maintaining the ties and reciprocal influence between actions in physical and cyber spaces. It aims at examining the impact of cyber territories on the perception, definition and effectiveness of personal space within different circumstances; and its role in changing the uses of spaces where people used to act habitually. The personal space, here, will be represented as the core of both: change and consistency—the space of bridging the reciprocal effect of cyber and physical counterparts, which is transformed through the experience of physical events mediated into the cyberspace. The paper is part of a study which looks at the case of Tahrir Square during the Egyptian political movement in 2011. We will compare the activists’ actions and practices in the Square during different events of non-routine use of the square and its surroundings. The case study will show the level of consistency in the features of the produced personal space within different waves of the revolutionary actions for all that different circumstances, motivations and results.

Worldwide measures towards reducing energy use and CO₂ emissions has become of a prime concern to mitigate the current and to adapt with the future climate change symptoms. Fifty percent of carbon emissions in Egypt result from the residential sector due to the existing energy inefficient building stock. The Egyptian national development targets to reduce CO₂ emission by 20 % by 2020 however the actions taken to reach the target are not promising. This study aims at developing a carbon mapping tool designed to measure the carbon foot print for residential buildings in Egypt and to offer a retrofitting carbon mitigation solutions on both building and urban level. That is through a web tool that will enable to calculate and visualize the carbon emissions of specific existing residential buildings. This web tool also serve as a decision support means for architects and planer during projects planning and design development phases. In addition it supports measuring the impact of housing retrofit and using renewable technologies for energy production. It serves to anticipate occupants’ behaviour to form a grid for decarbonisation on town planning and city level. The study is still in its theoretical phase and in the paper we are showing the outline for the tool knowhow and its expected results.

Around one billion people (UN 2012) worldwide live in informal settlements (also known commonly by the more derogatory names of slums, ghettos, shantytowns etc.), and these areas are often ravaged by fires. This paper presents an overview of the problem of fires in informal settlements and provides an understanding of fire engineering such that problems can be better addressed. Research work is based primarily on data from South Africa, especially Cape Town, although the research is generally applicable to areas worldwide. Informal settlements can become more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable when dwellings, or “shacks”, are not being regularly razed to the ground. An introduction to fire dynamics in small enclosures is provided and related to informal settlement dwellings, and it is shown how such behavior influences possible solutions. Discussions seek to bring data already well-known in the social science realm into the engineering field such that the problem can also be understood and addressed by engineers and fire scientists. Input parameters for fire models are outlined.

This paper presents the importance of building’s envelop protection, the role of the building materials, the technologies and approaches involved and how the development and the use of modern high albedo coatings, based on traditional and mineral binders, could have a significant contribution in Mediterranean building’s energy performance. A number of inorganic, white and coloured, high solar reflective and breathable coating materials, based on natural and traditional binders (.i.e. waterglass, lime, natural pozzolans), synthetic and natural pigments (.i.e. burnt sienna) and/or unlimited resources (i.e. sand) have been developed. The use of such coatings in built environment and especially on building’s envelope, as a passive cooling technique, enable the improvement of indoor thermal comfort conditions and the reduction of cooling loads, driving to lower carbon dioxide emissions and to significant energy savings.

Egypt suffers from a major shortage in the produced electrical energy compared to local energy consumption. In order to solve the electricity crisis in Egypt, there must be alternatives to the traditional electric systems, which will reduce the electrical consumption significantly. One of those solutions is the district cooling concept. District cooling plant is proposed to be constructed at the British University in Egypt to serve the main seven buildings of the university campus. The current cooling system installed in the campus is composing of Direct Expansion (DX) splits and air handling units for all the university buildings, except for the main auditorium building which is supplied by chilled water from three reciprocating chillers. The current system cooling capacity is found to be 1882.3 TR which is resulted from combining the nominal value for each installed DX unit and for each chiller capacity. However, the proposed district cooling plant shows great reduction in the cooling load required as proved from comprehensive calculations using the hourly analysis program (HAP) that the total coincident load of the proposed plant has found to be 1284.6 TR. The proposed primary cooling plant composes of three centrifugal chillers which is considered to be the most convenient chiller configuration for the university premises due to the variable cooling load, low part load and unavailability of natural gas pipelines needed for some other chillers type such as absorption chillers.

In most cases the helicopter transmission system comprises of the main gearbox (MGB), auxiliary gearbox (AGB), intermediate gearbox (IGB) and tail rotor gearbox (TGB). A local gear fault will impose a force variation in the gearbox and changes the gear angular velocity resulting in frequency modulations, which in turn generates sidebands and changes the vibration signature. The change in vibration signature contains information about the health of the gearbox from which diagnosis can be made to prevent the catastrophic effect of propagated fault. The helicopter gearbox vibration mode differs from those of other systems due to the transmission noise, structural noise and aero acoustic noise which masks the sideband. Thus an attempt is made to review the condition indicators that have been applied for fault diagnosis on the helicopter gearbox. This review is intended to advance the knowledge and the performance of Health and Usage Monitoring System in the helicopter transmission system.

Improper and unnecessary maintenance actions can result in a waste of resources, time, and money. Training and education play an important role in the successful implementation of a maintenance strategy. The Center for Predictive Maintenance (CPM) at the University of South Carolina has developed a demonstration methodology and tool that can be used to educate and train users extending from maintainers to leadership on the maintenance process from fault to maintenance action. This overall methodology has been developed so that it can be applied to a variety of industries including general machinery, petroleum and petro chemicals, and water treatment. All of these industries have a need for successful implementation of predictive maintenance programs and this demonstration methodology can be used to train and educate users. This demonstration tool will walk an audience through the maintenance process starting with the collection of sensor and historical data. Then it will show the analysis of the data through modeling and statistical analysis techniques. Finally, the data and results are displayed in unique dashboards that provide personnel with the information needed to make educated decisions on the condition and maintenance of their system.

Higher order spectral analysis of vibration signals is an efficient tool in condition monitoring and fault detection and diagnosis of rotating machinery. In this paper, features extracted from vibration bispectrum are used in fault classification of critical rotating components in the AH-64D helicopter tail rotor drive train system. Different classifiers are used to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm based on bispectrum to the traditional algorithms based on linear auto- and cross-power spectral analysis techniques. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used to reduce the size of features extracted from vibration bispectrum and linear spectral analysis, then the reduced set is used to train different classifiers. Using different criteria such as accuracy, precision, sensitivity, F score, true alarm, and error classification accuracy (ECA), the performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared against similar classification algorithms. The proposed method is verified using real-world data collected from a dedicated AH-64D helicopter drive-train research test bed at the CPM center, University of South Carolina. The proposed algorithm increases the accuracy of fault detection to 96.88%, precession to 95.83%, sensitivity to 95.83%.

The University of South Carolina has been involved in research for the US military for helicopters and rotary aircraft for over 18 years. Majority of this work has been focused on optimizing aircraft uptime and flight readiness by leveraging condition-based maintenance (CBM), more commonly known as predictive maintenance (PM). This type of maintenance differs from other classical styles (reactive and preventive) in that it has a high reliability and a low cost. The foundation of PM in any application is data collection and storage. It begins with applying tools such as natural language processing (NLP) to historical maintenance records to determine the most critical components on the aircraft. Data mining of previously collected sensor data is then used to establish the most reliable types of condition indicators (CIs) that monitor the critical components. These thresholds from the CIs can be modified over time as more data is collected. Once a data collection scheme is in place, prognostics can be used to determine the remaining useful life of a component. Using this process, along with an optimized maintenance schedule through the maintenance steering group (MSG-3) program, helps to eliminate unnecessary maintenance actions on the aircraft, as well as, reduce the inventory of components needed for the aircraft to operate. After this maintenance scheme has been set up, the Internet of Things (IoT) can be leveraged to allow the entire process to operate within a single environment. This further develops the solution, and allows actions to be executed more quickly than if they were performed individually. The expected benefits and future development of these practices will never come to fruition unless personnel are properly educated and trained. Developing a culture of predictive maintenance practices in an aviation environment is necessary to ensure success of this solution.

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of nanoparticle-enhanced oil on the state variables of internal combustion engines not limited to gas turbine engines. Two samples of nano-oil were tested: one sample contained AeroShell 560 with diamond nanoparticles additives while the other constituted of zinc sulfide, boron nitride, and graphene nanoparticles. The lubricating oils were tested in a UH-60 Blackhawk Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) to examine the influence of such oils on the operating temperature and efficiency of the engine. Experimental results from the nano-oil study suggest that the use of nanoparticle-enhanced oils could provide significant improvements in engine efficiency by reducing vibration and temperature of the engine. To further characterize the effects of nano-oils, a supplementary oil study was conducted on a small 4-stroke engine. The same oil samples were tested in the experiment with the addition of a conventional Pennzoil High Mileage 5 W-30 and a diamond nanoparticle-enhanced Pennzoil High Mileage 5 W-30. This supplementary investigation confirmed that nano-oils improve fuel efficiency of combustion engines by reducing engine temperature and vibration. However, some oil samples yielded anomalous results, discussed in later sections of this article.

Helicopter main gearbox (MGB) is one of the critical parts to ensure safety flight. The healthy condition of MGB is usually monitored by vibration and temperature sensors in helicopter Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS). Vibration sensors are mounted on the MGB case to avoid complex wiring inside the confined space of MGB. However, defects related signatures might be severely contaminated by background noise resulting from variable transmission paths from the defects to the receiving externally mounted vibration sensors. In this paper, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) scheme was utilized to attract bearing defect related signature from external mounted vibration sensors. The EMD decomposes vibration signal into a number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) for subsequent envelope analysis. The analysis result shows the efficacy of the EMD scheme in detecting the bearing fault signatures from vibration signal.

Acoustic Emission (AE) has been adopted widely in structural health monitoring of buildings, walls, bridges, and has shown great potentials in incipient rotating machine fault detection [1, 2]. However, one inevitable problem that hinders AE of being practically applied in rotating machine fault detection is the transmission of AE signal inside the machine, as AE signal generally comprises high frequency components of typically 100kHz to 1MHz which will require transmission system to have extremely high data-rate for real-time monitoring. Traditional digital wireless system, for instance, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, cannot satisfy the requirement. This paper addresses the issue of wireless AE transmission for rotating machine, with a modified analogue AE wireless transmission system. Piezoelectric wafer active sensor (PWAS), a lab-crafted miniature sensor was adopted to fulfill the need of small system.