Reusing built heritage resources with sustainability

Many old cities spread all over the world, face obsolete buildings, quarters or areas that urge for maintenance, re-adaptation or demolition. Among time, built heritage has always been re-used or recycled, suffering adaptations related to the living needs of its inhabitants and contemporary society context. Commonly, building’s lifespan regarding its survival and eventual disappearance, either partial or total, has scarcely been taken into consideration. But now, with the Ecological concerns as an imperative XXI century claim from our devastated planet, Society has to face existent buildings as a liable construction resource, that already occupies a considerable area of our cities and that would be foolish to waste. Re-Architecture: Lifespan Rehabilitation of Built Heritage, born in 2002 as a concept and is now being developed in a PhD research; coordinated by Prof. Ir. Jouke Post and Dr. Ir. Peter Erkelens. This renewal system under development, will not only contribute for the quality improvement of existent buildings interventions; in flexibility, sustainability and lifespan assessment, adaptive to consumer/user expectations and needs; but also for the preservation of both built and environmental heritage

Van 'aap, noot, mies, huis' naar 'zon, wind en water'

Professor Post schetst een beeld van de toekomstige ontwerp- en bouwopgave. De grote maatschappelijke aandacht voor het milieu zal verstrekkende gevolgen hebben voor zowel de ontwerp- als de bouwmethoden. In het college schetst hij een toekomst waarin de praktijk, het onderzoek en het onderwijs samenkomen

How sustainable rehabilitation designers really are

RE-ARCHITECTURE is a design process support system that aims to support designers, when involved in rehabilitation design developments. Before getting access to the full content of RE-ARCHITECTURE, users were asked to contribute to a pre-survey, by answering online Questionnaire B1. The analysis of its results, intended to identify the category of designers, their design processes and guiding principles. As RE-ARCHITECTURE aims to contribute to a more sustained and lifespan conscious rehabilitation design development, this pre-survey is fundamental to understand how sustainable rehabilitation designers really are and how appropriate RE-ARCHITECTURE can be to sustain their aims. This paper synthesizes the pre-survey results, where such issues were most evident

Re[valuating]-architecture

The architectural hierarchy of aims altered in the last decades. Quality and comfort have dethroned functionality! We are already familiar with the taxonomy – quality certification in the construction world; but in architectural designs, it is not common to evaluate scientifically, if the design has quality or, if the designer has performed qualitatively well regarding the circumstances. Therefore, evaluations that go beyond technical regulations are usually vague and subjective. Integrated in the doctoral research Re-Architecture: Lifespan rehabilitation of built heritage, supervised by Prof. Post and Prof. Erkelens, the architect Ana Pereira Roders is theorizing a design process for rehabilitation interventions, where the pre-design and design evaluation are key stages

Constitutive modelling of Sandvik 1RK91

A physically based constitutive equation is being developed for the maraging\ud stainless steel Sandvik 1RK91. The steel is used to make precision parts. These parts are formed through multistage forming operations and heat treatments from cold rolled and annealed sheets. The specific alloy is designed to be thermodynamically unstable, so that deformation even at room temperatures can bring about a change in the phase of face centred cubic austenite to either hexagonal closed packed martensite and/or, body centred cubic martensite. This solid state phase change is a function of the strain path, strain, strain rate and temperature. Thus, the fraction of the new phase formed depends on the state of stress at a given location in the part being formed. Therefore a set of experiments is being conducted in order to quantify the stress-strain behavior of this steel under various stress states, strain, strain rate as well as temperature. A magnetic sensor records the fraction of ferromagnetic martensite formed from paramagnetic austenite. A thermocouple as well as an infra red thermometer is used to log the change in temperature of the steel during a mechanical test. The force-displacement data are converted to stress-strain data after correcting for the changes in strain rate and temperature. These data are then cast into a general form of constitutive equation and the transformation equations are derived from Olson-Cohen type functions