Search results for "Building materials"
showing 10 items of 23 documents
Measure the Embodied Energy in Building Materials: An Eco-Sustainable Approach for Construction
2019
This paper highlights how the use of materials and building components often implicates the growth of embodied energy necessary to their construction, which is not always adequately compensated by a decrease of operational energy because incorporated energy can be almost half of the total energy used in a building’s life cycle and, sometimes, it even exceeds operational energy. The paper highlights how searching only for “operational” energy efficiency does not sufficiently guarantee environmental sustainability of the intervention. The intervention is heavily influenced by embodied energy whose knowledge must drive, since the beginning, the decision-making process towards more sustainable …
Bivalve mollusks shells valorisation and recycling: market potentiality and novel building products
2023
Construction is a fundamental driver of the world economy, recognized as a sector that generates a great contribution to the social and economic development. At the same time, it shows an enormous environmental impact through an unstoppable consumption of non-renewable resources, a high energy consumption, and an associated atmospheric emission of pollutant. Consequently, the research and development of novel and green production processes and sustainable building materials is of paramount importance. The sustainability of materials and production processes could be improved by enhancing and reusing wastes from various industrial sectors. In this paper, the fishery sector will be analysed, …
Quarry limestone dust as fine aggregate for concrete
2018
In quarrying activities, rock is extracted and transformed into aggregate of various sizes for civil engineering applications. In this process waste fine aggregates (dust waste) are generated. The disposal of this type of waste is a further cost in the extraction process, but also a possible cause of environmental pollution (e.g. leaching into water reserves, atmospheric pollution as a result of small particles causing respiratory diseases or deposited on plants disrupting photosynthesis, affecting aquatic habitats, etc.). A strategy for the effective recycling of quarry dust does not only reduce waste generation and disposal, but also addresses protection of the environment. The Italian qu…
Damage monitoring on carbonate stones: Field exposure tests contributing to pollution impact evaluation in two Italian sites
2017
During the last decades, many studies have been carried out on environmental monitoring in specific sites aiming at their protection and conservation; however, researches focused on the direct implications, in terms of quantitative evaluation of stone deterioration, of these monitoring actions are still scarce. This experimental work aims at monitoring the degradation processes affecting historical buildings constituted by carbonate stones. Specifically, specimens of Carrara marble and two limestones largely used in the Sicilian Baroque architecture, namely Noto and Comiso stones, were exposed outdoor in two Italian sites (Catania and Palermo), which are characterized by different environme…
Validity of NMR pore-size analysis of cultutal heritage ancient building materials containing magnetic impurities
2007
NMR relaxation time distributions, obtained with laboratory and portable devices, are utilized to characterize the pore-size distributions of building materials coming from the Roman remains of the Greek-Roman Theatre of Taormina. To validate the interpretation of relaxation data in terms of pore-size distribution, comparison of results from standard and in situ NMR experiments with results of the mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) has been made. Although the pore-size distributions can be obtained by NMR in terms of either longitudinal (T-1) or transverse (T-2) relaxation times distributions, the shorter duration of the T-2 measurement makes it, in principle, preferable, although the dete…
A Sustainable and Zero Energy Healthcare Facility in Mozambique
2016
Sustainable urban development, especially in economically disadvantaged regions, has increasingly become a major strategic priority. New settlements and urban regeneration programs have to improve the quality of social life, promote economic growth, increase environmental protection practices, and ensure the appropriate use of local resources. In that framework, a well-structured healthcare service is commonly conceived as vital for urban development. In response, this paper proposes the construction of one such healthcare facility in a deprived urban area in Maputo, Mozambique. Prioritising typical pillars of sustainability, the project’s design considers traditional building typology and …
Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: an implementation to marble products
2011
Active-passive control strategy for adjacent buildings
2011
Author's version of a chapter in the book: 2011 Proceedings of the American Control Conference. Also available from the publisher at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=05991059 In this paper, a control strategy to mitigate the vibrational response of adjacent buildings under seismic excitation is presented. The proposed strategy combines inter-building passive actuators with active actuators placed in the building stories. The main ideas are presented by means of a simplified two-building model; however, a semi-decentralized overlapping approach via the inclusion principle has been used to impose a proper information exchange structure suitable for wireless control of larg…
Terres et pierres pour matières de cultures : l'apparition et la diffusion de nouveaux modes et matériaux de construction dans le Nord-Est de la Gaul…
2017
Roman building materials often arose a growing interest through their presence in early contexts, sometimes way before Gallic Wars. Made from natural resources, their final shape corresponds to anthropogenic and cultural constraints. However, even if building materials are not neglected during archaeological excavations, so far they have been considered as playing a minor part in understanding ancient sites. Economical, technical and architectural aspects are regularly mentioned, creating the picture of an exploited « landscape » around the studied areas, but the question of materials as cultural markers witnessing intercultural relations between Rome and Gallic tribes has never really been…
Pierres et carrières : réflexions autour de différentes stratégies d’approvisionnement sur les chantiers bourguignons médiévaux
2021
In this paper, we want to discuss the complexity of the mechanisms of medieval building stone supplying based on a diachronically and multidisciplinary inquiry on several Cistercian and ducal study cases. The first results enlighten the constraint caused by land property that limits the builders to a supplying network shaped by domain and law. Thanks to the growing vitality of trade and the arrival of independent stone providers, criteria of selection gradually focus on stone itself. Both global and individual strategies evolve then, reinventing the networks of stone providing and the markets.