4,471 research outputs found
DESIGN TOOLS FOR LIFE CYCLE ANALYSIS AND DURABILITY EVALUATION OF BUILDING SYSTEMS: A RESEARCH ON THE BUILDING ENVELOPE
The behavior and service life prediction of building systems requires to develop tools to assist the designer. The paper is focused on a research carried out in the Department of Architecture and Design with the Department of Mathematical Sciences of the Politecnico di Torino. The goal is to develop a design tool to forecast the building subsystem durability and to help the designer in design options. The method is based on FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) developed in a qualitative way as well as in a probabilistic way. The analyst assess the functional models, the failures and the consequent predicted service life of components. The designer will select materials defining the risk coming from environmental agents, design, materials and workmanship. The estimated service life has been assessed by Monte Carlo method. The external walls was the example tested using data by investigations in the area of northern Italy and from literature
Detecting spatial homogeneity in the world trade web with Detrended Fluctuation Analysis
In a spatially embedded network, that is a network where nodes can be
uniquely determined in a system of coordinates, links' weights might be
affected by metric distances coupling every pair of nodes (dyads). In order to
assess to what extent metric distances affect relationships (link's weights) in
a spatially embedded network, we propose a methodology based on DFA (Detrended
Fluctuation Analysis). DFA is a well developed methodology to evaluate
autocorrelations and estimate long-range behaviour in time series. We argue it
can be further extended to spatially ordered series in order to assess
autocorrelations in values. A scaling exponent of 0.5 (uncorrelated data) would
thereby signal a perfect homogeneous space embedding the network. We apply the
proposed methodology to the World Trade Web (WTW) during the years 1949-2000
and we find, in some contrast with predictions of gravity models, a declining
influence of distances on trading relationships.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure
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