Feasibility of surface sampling in automated inspection of concrete aggregates during bulk transport on a conveyor

Automated optic inspection of concrete aggregates for pollutants (e.g. wood, plastics, gypsum and brick) is required to establish the suitability for reuse in new concrete products. Inspection is more efficient when directly sampling the materials on the conveyor belt instead of feeding them in a sampled stream to the sensor system. However,...

Putting recycled concrete into practice in Belgium: From case studies over chain management to standards and quality assurance

Although there has been extensive research and several demonstration projects in Belgium and abroad, the use of recycled aggregates in concrete is still limited in practice. Several barriers were identified: lack of practical experience, limiting standards and the need for specific quality assurance. The paper describes recent developments in...

Detection of Anomalies in Diaphragm Walls

If a calamity with a retaining wall occurs, the impact on surrounding buildings and infrastructure is at least an order of magnitude more severe than without the calamity. In 2005 and 2006 major leaks in the retaining walls of underground stations in Amsterdam and Rotterdam occurred. After these cases had been thoroughly studied it was concluded...

Non-destructive quality check on cast in-situ piles

A test field with 20 cast in-situ piles has been built. Flaws (necks, bulges and cracks) are built in. Existing and newly developed detecting methods have been tested. They show interpretable signals and also some challenges to improve the results. The final phase e.g. excavation of a representative number of piles will lead to final conclusions...

Visibility Analysis for 3D Urban Environments

This paper presents a visibility analysis tool for 3D urban environments and its possible applications for urban design practice. Literature exists for performing visibility analysis using various methods and techniques, however, tools that result from such research are generally not suitable for use by designers in practice. Our visibility...

ifcModelCheck

On behalf of the BBR (German Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning) the development of an Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) based inspection tool was accomplished as application on an underlying work-in-progress development framework. By providing a machine-based checking process the tool ModelCheck was rolled out to meet demands...

The City Biosphere: A novel theoretical and experimental methodology for the identification of catalysing mutations in city generation, assembly and development

This paper introduces a new experimental city generation, assembly and development platform, the urban mutations platform. We describe in detail a methodology for modeling urban systems and their dynamics, based on self-organization principles. The urban area is seen as an organism comprised of different “body parts”, the urban subunits. Upon...

Height Systems for 3D Cadastres

3D systems are built assuming the existence of suitable height reference systems. However, the earth is neither homogeneous nor flat, the plumb lines are curved and not parallel and the definition of height and the implementation of geodetic height systems is complex. 3D cadastral systems have the same problem. Cadastral systems are designed to...

Conceptual framework for potential implementations of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methods for design quality assessment

Architectural design can be considered as a process influenced by many stakeholders, each of which has different decision power. Each stakeholder might have his/her own criteria and weightings depending on his/her own perspective and role. Hence design can be seen as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) process. Considering architectural...

Between marketing and financial support: Dutch municipal policy instruments to improve the quality of private housing stock

Dutch municipalities are faced with an ageing private housing stock, of which parts show a diversity of quality backlogs, including their energy quality. Dutch municipalities are in the process of developing a combination of communicative and economic policy instruments to seduce private homeowners to invest in their dwellings’ quality....

The integrated management systems: The role of the main contractors

The authors examined the concept and qualitatively assessed the effectiveness of integrating different Management Systems (Quality Management System, Environmental Management System, Health & Safety Management System and, in case, Social Accountability Management System) established at Italian Main Contractors in order to improve the Contract...

Reclaiming consumption: Quality, quantity, sustainability

It is surely beyond doubt that current consumption trends are socially unjust and environmentally unsustainable. Scientists and practitioners who argue for sustainable consumption need not continue to theorize the environmental consequences of overconsumption; rather, emphasis should now be directed towards creating the changes in culture,...

Improvement of information for owner-occupiers about the quality of their house

Workshop 1. Session B.

Efficient Unstructured Hybrid Meshing and its Quality Improvement for Design Optimisation of Turbomachinery

Automatic robust unstructured hybrid meshing is indispensable for the success in design optimisation. In addition, it is important to maintain the mesh quality for deformation of geometry throughout the optimisation process for the reliability of optimal design. Mesh adaptation is useful to capture the flow feature which can highly affect flow...

Influence of Numerical Parameters for Large Eddy Simulations of Complex Flow Fields

Large eddy simulation (LES) becomes more and more important for the simulation of practical turbulent flows. The application for technically relevant, complex configurations leads to systems from around 500,000 up to several million degrees of freedom. For a statistical analysis of the turbulent flow field a large number of time steps have to be...