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Every material arriving at the construction site comes protected in some type of packaging, fundamentally cardboard, plastic or wood, and presently the great majority of these packagings finish in a container mixed with the rest of waste of the construction work. The increasing tendency to use prefabricated materials increases the volume of packaging necessary in product transport; in addition,...

A rock mass is a material quite different from other structural materials used in civil engineering. It is heterogeneous and quite often discontinuous, but is one of the materials in the earth's crust, which is most used in man's construction. Ideally, a rock mass is composed of a system of rock blocks and fragments separated by discontinuities forming a material in which all elements behave in...

Today visitors often approach the massive pyramids, temples, and obelisks of the ancient Egyptians with wonder and disbelief. The huge blocks of stone used to create these architectural masterpieces were quarried and moved without the aid of modern technologies, and it is diffi cult for us to imagine how such feats of engineering could be accomplished without the aid of cranes, bulldozers, truc...

recently, mixtures of clay-tire chips are used as construction material in civil engineering projects. with respect to the tending for using these materials, it is necessary to know their mechanical behavior. thereby, a number of undrained monotonic triaxial tests are carried out on the specimens of pure clay and clay-tire chip mixtures. mixed specimens prepared by mixing pure clay with 10%, 20...

Membrane-based separation technology has attracted great interest in many separation fields due to its advantages of easy-operation, energy-efficiency, easy scale-up, and environmental friendliness. The development of novel membrane materials and membrane structures is an urgent demand to promote membrane-based separation technology. Graphene oxide (GO), as an emerging star nano-building materi...

Both theoretical and experimental results on evaluating hidden water in building materials are reported to compare features of optical and microwave heating. Experiments have been performed on a 2 cm-thick reference sample made of gypsum pasteboard which contained voids filled with foamed polyurethane. The obtained results are compared to illustrate that advantages of microwave moisture detecti...

Gypsum wallboard is a popular building material, but is also very frequently overgrown by Stachybotrys chartarum after severe and/or undetected water damage. The purpose of this study was to determine whether Stachybotrys and other fungi frequently isolated from wet gypsum wallboard are already present in the panels directly from the factory. Surface-disinfected gypsum disks were wetted with st...

Building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) market is under developing stage with a relatively low number of installations worldwide. However, integrating photovoltaic technology into buildings is straight forward as no additional space is required and building materials are simply replaced by PV modules. Although BIPV is considered a promising technology, especially where land for large-scale PV p...