Nuts & Bolts: An exploration of design for deconstruction and component re-use in engineered timber construction

<p><b>This research is fuelled by the ever-increasing impact of global pollution and climate change, and the role the construction industry plays in it. Vast amounts of construction waste, needless manufacturing of single-use and composite products, and poor construction practices culminate in a linear economy model on which the world operates. It is a problem that can no longer be ignored and must be rectified. This research aims to develop and propose a construction system suitable for deconstruction and continued component reuse, using engineered timber products available in today’s market. The system will be tested against several implementations across a variety of building scales. This research has the intention of enabling component reuse for a circular economy. A circular economy minimises waste produced. Less waste is good.</b></p> <p>The resulting design proposal is a modular and prefabricated braced frame construction system to suit large and small scales, with removable foundations and adaptive spatial planning. Effective separation of building layers is achieved to allow for access, maintenance, and simple disassembly. Traditional Japanese timber joining techniques have also been researched and used to influence component connection design for deconstruction. This research eliminates irreversible fixings such as adhesives, nails, and screws. The system is then tested across commercial, residential, and small-scale implementations to test its feasibility.</p> <p>It will serve as a case study that questions how we think of buildings and value their components. It aims to enable the same components to be useful across multiple building scales, minimising redundancy and waste.</p>

Nuts & Bolts: An exploration of design for deconstruction and component re-use in engineered timber construction

<p><b>This research is fuelled by the ever-increasing impact of global pollution and climate change, and the role the construction industry plays in it. Vast amounts of construction waste, needless manufacturing of single-use and composite products, and poor construction practices culminate in a linear economy model on which the world operates. It is a problem that can no longer be ignored and must be rectified. This research aims to develop and propose a construction system suitable for deconstruction and continued component reuse, using engineered timber products available in today’s market. The system will be tested against several implementations across a variety of building scales. This research has the intention of enabling component reuse for a circular economy. A circular economy minimises waste produced. Less waste is good.</b></p> <p>The resulting design proposal is a modular and prefabricated braced frame construction system to suit large and small scales, with removable foundations and adaptive spatial planning. Effective separation of building layers is achieved to allow for access, maintenance, and simple disassembly. Traditional Japanese timber joining techniques have also been researched and used to influence component connection design for deconstruction. This research eliminates irreversible fixings such as adhesives, nails, and screws. The system is then tested across commercial, residential, and small-scale implementations to test its feasibility.</p> <p>It will serve as a case study that questions how we think of buildings and value their components. It aims to enable the same components to be useful across multiple building scales, minimising redundancy and waste.</p>

The Impact of Strategic Core-Component Reuse on Product Life Cycles

The mobile games business is an ever-increasing sub-sector of the entertainment industry. Due to its high profitability but also high risk and competitive atmosphere, game publishers need to develop strategies that allow them to release new products at a high rate, but without compromising the already short lifespan of the firms' existing games. Successful game publishers must enlarge their user base by continually releasing new and entertaining games, while simultaneously motivating the current user base of existing games to remain active for more extended periods. Since the core-component reuse strategy has proven successful in other software products, this study investigates the advantages and drawbacks of this strategy in mobile games. Drawing on the widely accepted Product Life Cycle concept, the study investigates whether the introduction of a new mobile game built with core-components of an existing mobile game curtails the incumbent's product life cycle. Based on real and granular data on the gaming activity of a popular mobile game, the authors find that by promoting multi-homing (i.e., by smartly interlinking the incumbent and new product with each other so that users start consuming both games in parallel), the core-component reuse strategy can prolong the lifespan of the incumbent game.

An Architecture Of Disassembly And Cyclical Material Life

This thesis explores disassembly as architectural expression and liberator of components for reuse and recycling in order to diminish material waste when the building is deemed obsolete. It questions that contemporary buildings be built for permanence, but proposes instead that they be able to be modified and taken apart in order to provide material for the next generation of buildings instead of the landfill. It examines the history and theory of joints and connections in architecture and the possibilities these offer for disassembly. It examines production and construction methods pertaining to disassembly and reversible joints, as well as the implications of an architecture that strives to express its construction and material being. Principles of disassembly and component reuse are established through the study of temporary, prefabricated, modular, and waste-as-material precedents. The principles are utilized in the design project, which aims to create an architecture expressing the assembly of parts in addition to the whole while significantly contributing to a reduction of material waste.

An Architecture Of Disassembly And Cyclical Material Life

This thesis explores disassembly as architectural expression and liberator of components for reuse and recycling in order to diminish material waste when the building is deemed obsolete. It questions that contemporary buildings be built for permanence, but proposes instead that they be able to be modified and taken apart in order to provide material for the next generation of buildings instead of the landfill. It examines the history and theory of joints and connections in architecture and the possibilities these offer for disassembly. It examines production and construction methods pertaining to disassembly and reversible joints, as well as the implications of an architecture that strives to express its construction and material being. Principles of disassembly and component reuse are established through the study of temporary, prefabricated, modular, and waste-as-material precedents. The principles are utilized in the design project, which aims to create an architecture expressing the assembly of parts in addition to the whole while significantly contributing to a reduction of material waste.

An Integrated Framework for Traceability and Impact Analysis in Requirements Verification of Cyber–Physical Systems

In the field of model-based design of Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS), seamless traceability of the process, from requirements to models to simulation results, is becoming increasingly important. It can be used to support several activities such as variant handling, impact analysis, component reuse, software maintenance and evolution, verification, and validation. Despite the fact that the relevance of traceability in the model-based design of CPSs is well known, current tools that support traceability management are inadequate in practice. The lack of comprehensive whole-lifecycle systems engineering support in a single tool is one of the main causes of such ineffective traceability management, where traceability relationships between artifacts are still manually generated and maintained. This paper aims at presenting an approach and a prototype for automatically generating and maintaining the appropriate traceability links between heterogeneous artifacts ranging from requirement models, through design models, down to simulation and verification results throughout the product life cycle in model-based design of CPSs. A use case study is presented to validate and illustrate the proposed method and prototype.

A Calculus of Interfaces for Distributed Collaborative Systems: The Guarded Attribute Grammar Approach

International audience We address the problem of component reuse in the context of service-oriented programming and more specifically for the design of user-centric distributed collaborative systems modelled by Guarded Attribute Grammars. Following the contract-based specification of components we devel-opp an approach to an interface theory for the components of a collaborative system in three stages: we define a composition of interfaces that specifies how the component behaves with respect to its environement, we introduce an implementation order on interfaces and finally a residual operation on interfaces characterizing the systems that, when composed with a given component, can complement it in order to realize a global specification. Nous abordons le problème de la réutilisation des composants dans le contexte de la programmation orientée services et plus spécifiquement pour la conception de systèmes collaboratifs distribués centrés sur l'utilisateur modélisés par des grammaires attribuées gardées. En suivant la démarche de la spécification contractuelle des composants, nous développons une approche de la théorie des interfaces pour les composants d'un système collaboratif en trois étapes: on définit une composition d'interfaces qui spécifie comment le composant se comporte par rapport à son environnement, on introduit un ordre d'implémentation sur les interfaces et enfin une opération de résidus sur les interfaces qui caractérise les systèmes qui, lorsqu'ils sont composés avec un composant donné, peuvent le compléter afin de réaliser une spécification du système global.