Case Studies of Building Rehabilitation and Design

The design of blast resistant buildings is required for safety of operations and humans in petroleum refineries. These refineries require blast resistant buildings for the operations near the possible ground zero of the explosive unit. This chapter explains the design for blast resistant building in petroleum refinery in Mumbai, India. This chapter investigates the present research in blast resistant building. Then, it explains a case study of blast resistant operation building designed near Diesel Hydrodesulphurisation unit. Some of the important design parameter includes the loading, concrete retaining wall design and aesthetic. The research looks into important question for blast resistant buildings like How does the building behave during the explosion? How to design a Reinforced Cement Concrete structure for blast resistant design? What are architectural criteria for design of blast resistant buildings? How to design a facade that resist the blast as well as looks appealing aesthetically? The application of similar design can be adapted for the blast resistant buildings under threat from terrorist attack and for military installations. Furthermore, this chapter illustrated an innovative design of facade for bast resistant buildings.

Address to the search for the necessary sustainability in today’s societies, cities and architecture become the appropriate environment in which to look for a balance between socio-economic growth and caring for the environment. The green roofs, as part of this sustainable architecture, allow, thanks to their construction and their particularities, to obtain a series of environmental, energy and thermal benefits. The magnitude of the energy improvement is influenced by several factors, among which the state of the envelope of the building in which it is installed stands out. In the field of refurbishment, where a large part of the buildings to be refurbished have little or no insulation in the envelope, the contribution of the green roofs to energy saving and the improvement of interior thermal comfort is of great relevance, being able to reach energy savings in cooling of 49%, while in already insulated structures this value drops to 6%. The different types of green roofs must be studied, therefore, considering, not only the benefits that can be achieved, but also characteristics such as weight and cost depending on the field of application.

Bell towers are slender structures of variable dimensions that are highly subjected to seismic damage due to their structural characteristics. The seismic response of bell towers and the design of potential retrofit interventions depend on their configuration, either isolated or connected to other constructions making part of ecclesiastic complexes. The different seismic behavior of bell towers depending or less from the interaction with other structures is evaluated in the current work, which analyses a case study of a RC tower inserted within a masonry church placed in the municipality of Torre del Greco, in the district of Naples (Italy). Three different macro-element models of the RC bell tower developed with the 3MURI software are considered: the tower alone, the tower together with the masonry structure just below its vertical projection and the tower including the whole volume of the church. Whereas the isolated model overestimates the bell tower seismic capacity, modelling of other structural part allows to obtain more reliable prediction of the real behavior of the tower. Based on the achieved seismic response, a suitable retrofit intervention with C-FRP fibers is planned for seismic upgrading of the tower through improvement of the performance of beams and columns under bending moment, shear and axial loads. The effectiveness of retrofit interventions is performed both locally, by performing the verification of structural sections, and globally, by analyzing the seismic behavior of the entire ecclesiastic complex.

This work presents an experimental campaign with 162 specimens of cylindrical specimens of 10 × 20 cm² and 27 prismatic specimens with 25 × 25 × 50 cm³, in order to analyse the influence of nine different concrete mixtures on compressive strength and the propagation profile of longitudinal ultrasonic waves. A neural network is best defined as a set of simple, highly interconnected processing elements that are capable of learning information presented to them and its ability to learn and process information classifies it as a form of artificial intelligence. In this work, neural networks models were used to find out the influence of several parameters used in fabrication of concrete on the material compressive strength. The results obtained showed that the simulation with neural networks associated with ultrasound tests are important tools to evaluate the compressive strength of concrete.

This research aims to evaluate the reliability of computational simulation by analyzing data from simulations and field measurements (MC) of 14 case studies, in relation to internal vertical partition systems (SVVI). Comparative analysis of 75 SVVI results, SC and MC data showed that more than 50% of the simulation data showed values compatible with the in-field measurement, in the sense that they were considered potentially equal, taking into account the uncertainty of the predicted field measurement. in the evaluation methodology contained in the standard, in the order of ±2 dB. This acceptability refers to the values within the ±2 dB range of the aforementioned uncertainty. The data also showed variation between SC and MC, sometimes presenting larger SC, sometimes larger MC. The predicted hypothesis was that SC would always be higher due to the ideal conditions of the simulation, which do not occur in the field. However, where situations of MC greater than SC occurred, it was deduced that deciding on the simulation means choosing to work in favor of safety, since the minimum level of the standard is projected and better results are obtained in the field. It was also verified, through variation of the input data, that the fidelity with the technical specification of the designed systems reproduces reliable values, and the opposite, results in doubtful and discrepant data. In general, the results of the comparative analysis point to the use of computer simulation as positive, since part of the percentage that is not acceptable in this study represents doubtful measurements, and therefore, the simulation is an effective predictive tool and useful in the search for acoustic quality in residential buildings.