Construction Managers' Perception of the Factors Affecting Sustainability in Construction Projects

Sustainable construction is a comprehensive concept which requires long-term planning. Moreover, construction managers play a key role in leading, planning and scheduling of a construction project. As a result, sustainability of construction projects can be affected by construction managers’ decisions. In addition, for greater development of sustainable construction, affecting factors should firstly be notified. Therefore, it seems necessary to investigate construction managers’ perception of the factors affecting sustainability in construction projects. To quantify managers’ perspective of construction sustainability, a survey involving 15 construction managers from Iran construction industry was employed. A statistical comparative analysis used to identify the most important factors affecting sustainability performance at project-level. The results show that most of the factors affecting sustainable construction can be addressed by management teams. The findings will be useful for managers to improve construction sustainability performance at project-level

Power quality state estimation: A new concept

The need to modernise the grid to enable it to meet the needs of the future is well accepted. This has led to the Smart Grid concepts as a pathway for increasing the smartness of the electrical grid so as to meet the demands of the future. Part of this involves advances in metering infrastructure which will make a large amount of data available in the future. This necessitates using smart algorithms to take full advantage of the available data so as to improve management of the distribution system. The importance of power quality issues, due to the significant losses associated with poor power quality, has resulted in research being focused on extending the concept of state estimation techniques into power quality issues as well. This paper gives an overview of power quality state estimation and then under the umbrella of Power Quality State Estimation (PQSE) as a smart algorithm, focuses on one the most recent addition, Transient State Estimation (TSE)

Power Quality State Estimation

Traditional state estimation whereby the state of the system is assessed based on a limited number of measurements is a well established tool for steady-state situations where the frequency of the system is 50 Hz. Previous contributions have looked at extending this concept to the power quality area. This area of research is called Power Quality State Estimation (PQSE) and represents a class of techniques. Under the umbrella of PQSE, the main contribution of this work is taking Transient State Estimation (TSE) on step further. A new three-phase formulation for TSE using the Numerical Integrator Substitution (NIS) will be detailed. NIS approach, also known as Dommel's method, gives a numerical solution to describe the transient behaviour of a dynamic system at discrete time points. The new transient state estimator is implemented and verified by applying the proposed algorithm to a real distribution test system. It's performance and accuracy are investigated in presence of measurement noise, background harmonics, multiple faults, etc. The conducted study has shown this technique has a great potential

Medical journal of Basrah University

Voltage sags are common events on the electric power network caused by network faults and the large load connections. This power quality issue can affect a wide range of electrical equipment malfunctions, interruptions or losses and are of particular concern to industry. A complete knowledge of the source is a prerequisite before any remedial action is taken. On the other hand, it is not feasible to fully monitor voltage sags occurred throughout the network. For this reason state estimation techniques have been extended into power quality issues and called Power Quality State Estimation (PQSE). This paper, introduces the use of Transient State Estimation (TSE) as one type of PQSE for voltage dip/sag assessment. The presented approach makes use of mismatch nodal voltage to identify the type and location of voltage dip/sag origin via limited number of measurement points within the network. Then, this algorithm is applied to a distribution test system to verify its performance in presence of measurement noise. © 2012 IEEE