Building client/owners need estimates of likely construction costs for budgeting purposes early in the procurement process when little detailed design information is available beyond the type, size and location of the facility. One of the more sophisticated techniques available for this purpose is the storey enclosure method, developed by James in 1954. This uses the basic physical measurements of the building envelope, together with an arbitrary set of multipliers, or weights, to forecast tender/bid prices. Although seldom used in practice, James succeeded in showing his method to be capable of significantly outperforming alternative approaches.
The research reported in this paper aimed firstly to reassess James’ claims with new data and secondly to advance his method by using regression techniques to obtain the weights involved. Based on data from 138 completed Hong Kong projects for four types of building, two types of regression models were developed. This involved the use of sophisticated features such as leave-one-out cross validation to simulate the way in which forecasts are produced in practice and a dual stepwise selection strategy that enhances the chance of identifying the best model. An algorithm was also designed to select the appropriate parametric and non-parametric tests for objective and rigorous model evaluation against alternatives.
The results indicate that, contrary to James’ claim, both his original method and the two regression-based alternatives are not significantly better or worse than other models. Surprisingly, the widely used floor area model was found to under-perform in terms of consistency for offices and private housing. For private housing in particular, it was felt that the storey enclosure method was likely to offer good prospects of improvement on those methods currently in use in practice. 相似文献
The 1994 Northridge earthquake caused brittle fractures in steel moment frame building connections, despite causing little visible building damage in most cases. Future strong earthquakes are likely to cause similar damage to the many un-retrofitted pre-Northridge buildings in the western US and elsewhere. Without obvious permanent building deformation, costly intrusive inspections are currently the only way to determine if major fracture damage that compromises building safety has occurred. Building instrumentation has the potential to provide engineers and owners with timely information on fracture occurrence. Structural dynamics theory predicts and scale model experiments have demonstrated that sudden, large changes in structure properties caused by moment connection fractures will cause transient dynamic response. A method is proposed for detecting the building-wide level of connection fracture damage, based on observing high-frequency, fracture-induced transient dynamic responses in strong motion accelerograms. High-frequency transients are short (<1 s), sudden-onset waveforms with frequency content above 25 Hz that are visually apparent in recorded accelerations. Strong motion data and damage information from intrusive inspections collected from 24 sparsely instrumented buildings following the 1994 Northridge earthquake are used to evaluate the proposed method. The method’s overall success rate for this data set is 67%, but this rate varies significantly with damage level. The method performs reasonably well in detecting significant fracture damage and in identifying cases with no damage, but fails in cases with few fractures. Combining the method with other damage indicators and removing records with excessive noise improves the ability to detect the level of damage. 相似文献
A kinetic model of the degradation of 4-CP by Fenton/O(2) system was established, in which particular attention was paid to the role of oxygen in the process because many former researches suggested that the presence of oxygen could decrease the input of H(2)O(2). The proposed model well predicted 4-CP degradation and H(2)O(2) consumption by Fenton/O(2) and Fenton/N(2) systems at varying levels of Fe(2+), H(2)O(2), and 4-CP input. Most correlation coefficients between experimental and predicted data of 4-CP and H(2)O(2) concentration were above 0.95. The model could predict the enhancement of 4-CP degradation by oxygen and the difference in the evolution of aromatic intermediates between Fenton/O(2) and Fenton/N(2) system. The predicted and experimental data both showed the degree of benzene ring cleavage in Fenton/O(2) system was higher than that in Fenton/N(2) system. Understanding the role of oxygen is very important to improve the decomposition performance. 相似文献
A series of reduced-scale experiments were carried out in order to investigate thermal behaviors of window flame, which exposes the upper floors as well as the adjacent buildings to potential risks of fire spread. A stainless pan filled with alcohol was used as the fire source and was placed inside a cubic compartment of 900 mm side. Temperatures and velocities at various points inside and outside of the compartment were measured. The compartment was pressurized during the experiment by mechanically supplying air at several mass inflow rates through an inlet duct set at the bottom part of the compartment. This was for simulating fire conditions under the effect of external wind pressure. On the basis of the experimental observation, line (i.e., two-dimensional) heat source assumption was adopted for developing a model of window flame behavior. A dimensionless parameter Q′* was derived from the governing differential equations in order to generalize the measurement results. Expressions for temperature rise along the trajectory ΔTm and characteristic flame width bT were developed incorporating the parameter Q′*. 相似文献