Towards a circular building industry through digitalisation: Exploring how digital technologies can help narrow, slow, close, and regenerate the loops in social housing practice

The concept of Circular Economy (CE) has emerged as a promising alternative to the current linear economy, decoupling economic activity from the depletion of natural resources and promoting a restorative and regenerative system. The transition of the building industry to a circular one can be achieved through four core resource principles:...

A Review of Mathematical Models of Building Physics and Energy Technologies for Environmentally Friendly Integrated Energy Management Systems

The Energy Management System (EMS) is an efficient technique to monitor, control and enhance the building performance. In the state-of-the-art, building performance analysis is separated into building simulation and control management: this may cause inaccuracies and extra operating time. Thus, a coherent framework to integrate building physics...

Digitalization for a circular economy in the building industry: Multiple-case study of Dutch social housing organizations

Digital technologies are considered enablers of circular economy implementation in the built environment. Literature mainly focuses on conceptual or review studies examining the role of digital tools (e.g., material passport and building information modelling) to close the material loops. There is a lack of understanding of how digital...

Circular composites: A design guide for products containing composite materials in a circular economy

The circular composites design guide presents circular economy strategies, product design aspects and tools to (re-)design products containing composite materials for a circular economy.<br/>A circular economy closes the loop for products, parts and materials, through reuse and recycling. In this guide you will find 5 circular economy strategies...

Archetypical CBMs in Construction and a Translation to Industrialized Manufacture

The circular economy is a widely accepted concept that various governments have started to adopt. Still, a major consumer of resources, the construction industry, struggles to implement business models that answer to the opportunity and generate value beyond economical. At the same time, the industry is at a threshold of intensifying their...

FLEX 3.0: An instrument to formulate the demand for and assessing the supply of the adaptive capacity of buildings

Market developments show increased demands for flexibility and sustainability by users and owners of buildings. A direct connection can be made between adaptive building and sustainability. The longer a building can keep its functional life cycle instead of becoming vacant or being demolished, the more sustainable a building will be. One way of...

Double-curved precast concrete elements: Research into technical viability of the flexible mould method

The production of precast, concrete elements with complex, double-curved geometry is expensive due to the high costcosts of the necessary moulds and the limited possibilities for mould reuse. Currently, CNC-milled foam moulds are the solution applied mostly in projects, offering good aesthetic performance, but also resulting in waste of material...

Continuing the building's material cycle: A literature review and analysis of current systems theories in comparison with the theory of cradle to cradle

Recently, the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) theory set ground in the Netherlands, propounding that environmental impact reduction can provide a positive economical impulse to stakeholders. The building industry has warmly received this approach and considers it to be a solution to the above-mentioned burden. However, if the building sector wants to...

Evidence-based design: Satellite positioning studies of city centre user groups

In an era of increasing competition between urban cores, positive pedestrian experiences become crucial in attracting visitors and retaining residents. The dichotomy between use and evaluation of public spaces enables the prioritisation of urban design and management interventions in an age of austerity. When spaces are highly used but evaluated...

Supply chain integration in the building industry: The emergence of integrated and repetitive strategies in a fragmented and project-driven industry

The building industry is a fragmented and project-driven industry with specific characteristics, which can sometimes result in negative effects. Reference has often been made to other industries, particularly manufacturing, that would function more effectively and efficiently. Major differences between both include the organisation and...

Sensor services for buildings: A framework and opportunities

The Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet-of-Things concepts are gathering more attention day-by-day. In the near future networks of interconnected sensors that are monitoring the environment around us will start to generate enormous amounts of data. This newly emerging paradigm can be named as „Sensors Everywhere”. This new paradigm will lead ...

Deformations and damage to buildings adjacent to deep excavations in soft soils

The objective of this study is to gain insight into mechanisms of soil-structure interaction for buildings adjacent to deep excavations and to find a reliable method to design and monitor deep excavations in urban areas with soft soil conditions. The research focuses on typical Dutch conditions. The main questions are: How can we predict the...

Exergy efficient building design

Ontevredenheid in de Nederlandse bouw: Een onderzoek naar het sociale interactieproces tussen partijen

Managing collaborative design

Collaborative design has been emerging in building projects everywhere. The more complex a building project becomes, the closer and more intensive collaboration between the design actors is required. This research focuses on collaborative design in the conceptual architecture design phase, especially during the elaboration of the masterplan and...

New instruments for dynamic building-construction: Computer as partner in construction

For dynamic processes to become possible in Building-Construction, ICT support is needed. Data access and data exchange needs to be ubiquitous. Existing research often only targets elaborate international standards (that don't really get off the ground because of international differences) or it targets big, elaborate, expensive systems (that...

Computational Support for the Selection of Energy Saving Building Components

Buildings use energy for heating, cooling and lighting, contributing to the problems of exhaustion of fossil fuel supplies and environmental pollution. In order to make buildings more energy-efficient an extensive set of âenergy saving building componentsâ has been developed that contributes to minimizing the energy need of buildings, that helps...

Level-Oriented Diagnosis for Indoor Climate Installations

Indoor climate installations are widely used in modern office buildings. Statistical data show that the energy consumption in buildings has grown quickly in the past decades. A considerable part is due to inefficient and improper operations of installations. Therefore, Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) for indoor climate installations has...