Building Defects Research Articles

ANALYSIS OF MEASURES TO REDUCE DEFECTS IN HOSPITAL BUILDINGS

Buildings are major components of hospital assets and substantial resources are invested in their design, construction, and maintenance. Although investments in hospital maintenance are increasing, instances have been recorded of dissatisfaction among the hospital building users with respect to extent of defects in the buildings. Defects in the building have tremendous impacts on user’s performance and satisfaction and on the hospitals’ profit margins. This research investigated the remedial actions to reduce the defects in the hospital buildings. Through a survey interview involving 6 hospitals, the results revealed that educating building users, providing training to maintenance operatives, conducting preventive maintenance, and creating awareness on the importance of building are the measures remedies to prevent defects. Furthermore, it is important to blend design and construction with the functional value of the buildings. This research provides fresh information on the maintenance of hospital buildings. Even though the data are collected in Malaysia, the results can be applied to hospital buildings outside of Malaysia.

Climatic conditions and the resilience of buildings along Lagos coastline

PurposeThe study investigates the extent to which defects in coastline buildings are influenced by the climatic conditions within the coastal zones.Design/methodology/approachThe study conducted both desk study and field survey. The primary data for the study were collected through a cross-sectional survey of facilities and maintenance managers of randomly selected coastline buildings. Of the 120 self-administered structured questionnaires, 102 were successfully retrieved representing an 85% response rate. Data collected were analysed using charts, relative prevalence index and Spearman's rho correlation visualization technique.FindingsSaltwater intrusion, ocean overflow, extreme rainfall, debris flow, floods and droughts are the prevalent climatic conditions along the coastline. Steel corrosion, foundation settlement, spalling of concrete and fading of finishes are prevalent defects in coastline buildings. The result shows a positive significant correlation between climatic conditions and defects in coastline buildings.Research limitations/implicationsThe study compliments literature on buildings resilience and maintenance management, and also provides a basis for streamlining future research on coastline buildings.Practical implicationsThe results provide information on climatic conditions and prevalent defects that should be considered during the design and construction of coastline buildings. The information provided could assist construction stakeholders in improving the resilience of coastline buildings.Originality/valueThe study established that coastline buildings are vulnerable to a rapid rate of defect and deterioration which threatens the sustainability of coastline cities. It suggests measures that could improve the resilience of the elements and components of coastline buildings and consequently enhance the safety of life and property, and improve the physical and economic performance of coastline buildings.

CBA-Based Evaluation Method of the Impact of Defects in Residential Buildings: Assessing Risks towards Making Sustainable Decisions on Continuous Improvement Activities

Evaluating the impact of defects in buildings and ranking the most impactful ones enables construction companies to better choose which paths to take in light of continuous improvement activities to support more sustainable decisions regarding the design and operation of buildings. As a result, the risks of the different choices are more clearly identified while assessing all tangible and intangible aspects of residential building defects in a structured way. Although recent studies on managing construction defects in residential buildings have focused on monetary losses associated with maintenance activities based on the defect’s frequency and severity, these studies do not take into account the levels of customer satisfaction. To address this gap, this paper proposes a novel evaluation method of the impact of defects to support decision-making in managing defect occurrences in residential buildings. The goal is to rank the defects’ impact based on a combination of some critical aspects: frequency of occurrence, financial considerations on repairing such defects, the impact that these defects have on customer satisfaction, and the cost and complexity of preventing and minimizing these defect occurrences through continuous improvement activities. The method consists of a structured set of steps that use data from technical assistance departments and customer satisfaction surveys, where information about the users’ level of satisfaction and the occurrence of defects is available. In this paper, data obtained from a construction company were used to test and validate the proposed method. The method also examines the challenges and barriers associated with the technique and points out that difficulties in acquiring reliable data are a bottleneck for making conscious and sustainable decisions to address construciton defects. Moreover, the case study results highlight essential capabilities needed by companies to correctly assess the impact of defects, such as correctly logging data in a structured database and having skilled personnel to verify defects users might have complained about. The paper ends by proposing a set of guidelines to use the method and stressing that structured methods for decision-making are crucial to analyze construction defects in a structured way while also incorporating the user’s perspective. The proposed method is expected to improve sustainable managerial decisions where economic, environmental, social, and technical risks can be accounted for to enhance the quality of projects from the customer’s perspective. Such analysis can help optimize and prioritize the use of resources and minimize the economic impact of activities on the construction company.

Defects in dispute : Common modern construction-related defects and their context in construction disputes

In this paper, the author considers the nature of construction-related defects identified from 59 of 307 reported decisions in cases from the England and Wales High Court Technology and Construction Court (TCC) between 15th January, 2016 and 11th November, 2019. The paper explores what surveyors, dispute resolvers and legal representatives can learn about the nature of construction-related defects from the identified cases. Defects cases over the last three to four years indicate that approximately 19 per cent of cases heard by the TCC relate to construction and building defects and remain a central part of TCC business. Current indications are that this trend will continue despite recent advances in methods of construction and technology.

Correlation between Defects and Technical Wear of Materials Used in Traditional Construction.

The degree of technical wear of old buildings, which are made of basic materials (cement, concrete, steel, timber, plaster, brick) using traditional technology, is expressed by the size and intensity of damage to their elements. The topic of the research concerns old residential buildings from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, which are located in the downtown district of Wroclaw, Poland. The descriptive analysis and the analysis of the definitions of defects that occur in the elements of residential buildings, which were performed as random analyzes, do not allow defects to be considered as measurable variables at a level of visual investigation. The major drawback of the method that is used by experts when assessing the technical condition of civil engineering buildings is that it does not numerically express the magnitude (strength) of the defects. Therefore, an attempt was made to numerically express the relationship (if such a relationship exists) between the occurred defects of buildings and the extent of their technical wear process. When calculating the strength of this relationship, the method of determining the point biserial correlation coefficient for the measurable property and the dichotomous property was used. It was found that the direction of the relation is right-hand for all the tested building elements, but the strength of the correlation between the detected defects and technical wear shows a considerable span and depends on the conditions of the apartment house’s maintenance. As a rule, damage caused by water penetration and moisture penetration always shows correlations of at least moderate strength.

Design, Construction, and Curing Integrated Management of Defects in Finishing Works of Apartment Buildings

The site analysis performed in the last ten years has found that building defects result from inconsistent decision-making and performance in the design, construction, and curing (DCC) processes. Therefore, for sustainable quality control, DCC integrated analysis and the management of causes by type and response measures should be in place. The objective of this study is to propose DCC integrated management of defects in finishing works of apartment buildings. To this end, the study surveyed 69,944 defects from 3299 apartment households and analyzed the defect types and causes by project stage. As a result, in the case of opening work (WT1), opening and closing (DT1) accounted for the highest proportion at 35.7%. In the case of furnishing work (WT2), floor installation (DT1) has the most defects. Moreover, the proposed integrated defect management technique was applied onsite, which resulted in an improvement where the defect frequency decreased by 56.80%. The results of this study will be used as the basic data for high-quality finishing projects, and the proposed management concept can be used as reference data in the establishment of a defect management system.

Deep learning smartphone application for real‐time detection of defects in buildings

Condition assessment and health monitoring (CAHM) of built assets requires effective and continuous monitoring of any changes to the material and/or geometric properties of the assets in order to detect any early signs of defects or damage and act on time. Most of the traditional CAHM techniques, however, depend on manual labour despite that, in some cases, the inspection environment can be unsafe and could lead to low efficiency or misjudgement of the severity of the defect. In recent years, computer vision techniques have been proposed as an automated alternative to the traditional CAHM techniques as methods for extracting and analysing feature-related information from asset images and videos. Such methods have proven to be robust and effective solutions, complementary to current time-consuming and unreliable manual observational practices. This work is concerned with the development of a deep learning-based smartphone app, which allows real-time detection of four types of defects in buildings, namely, cracks, mould, stain and paint deterioration. Since smartphones are widely available and equipped with high-resolution cameras, this application can offer a practical, low-cost solution for condition assessment procedures of built assets. The obtained results are promising and support the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach to identify and classify various types of building defects.

Occupants Satisfaction Towards Building Maintenance of Low-Cost Building Apartment In Kajang: Pilot survey

A typical apartment in Malaysia, especially in urban areas such as Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, is usually categorized as a low-cost residential building. Commonly, to distinguish its classification in the aggressive apartment sector, maintenance management is key to enhancing its market value. Therefore, this study focuses on building apartment maintenance through user satisfaction in the Kajang region, Selangor. Among its research objective is to identify the maintenance team's critical challenges in a low-cost apartment. The research engaged the quantitative and qualitative approaches, where questionnaire surveys were distributed to forty-three (43) respondents and interview sessions with six (6) experts. The research findings illustrated that the current maintenance level was dissatisfactory due to a low maintenance level, reflected through the number of occupants’ complaints about the facilities, maintenance aspects, and obvious building defects. A limited number of workers and a lack of maintenance period for building services were consistently the chief culprits for the maintenance team's poor performance. Hence, overcoming these critical challenges would effectively improve the environment in a low-cost apartment building.

Defect characterisations in the Malaysian affordable housing

PurposeThe successive Malaysian government aims to provide housing to households earning the median income and below. However, there has been continuous criticism and complaints from the media and literature on the magnitude of the defects in affordable housing. Therefore, this research has investigated the defects in affordable housing for the users’/occupants' perspectives.Design/methodology/approachWith a response rate of 69%, the research developed a questionnaire instrument that included twenty-one defects in buildings based on literature and observation. These were scored on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from very common to least common. Twelve causes of defects measured on a five-point scale were included in the survey. Thirteen additional items that had to do with remedial actions to reduce defects were included. These were scored on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from strongly agree to least agree. The survey forms were administered to all the 152 home occupants in a Program Perumahan Rakyat (PPR) housing estate through hand delivery in a northern state in Malaysia.FindingsThe data revealed that broken doors, damaged roofs, damp walls and broken tiles in rooms were the most common defects in the housing development. It was found that defects in the buildings were caused by poor workmanship, defective materials, poor designs and bad weather. Additionally, to rectify the defects, adequate supervision is required during maintenance, the repairs must be conducted on time and there is a need to have competent maintenance organisations. Through factor analysis, the 21 defects were structured into six factors, the 12 causes were grouped into 5 factors and the 13 remedial actions were grouped into 6 factors.Practical implicationsThe information on the nature, degree and kinds of defects from the users' perspectives will dictate when repair work is to be undertaken and allow future work to be programmed and financed as part of a maintenance rolling programme.Originality/valueThis research focused specifically on “Program Perumahan Rakyat” housing development. Furthermore, none of the previous research on defects conducted attempted to categorise the defects in the buildings. The categorisation is very important for systemic decision-making because there are continuous interactions amongst the defects, causes and remedial actions.

Fuzzy-stochastic model to assess defects in low-rise residential buildings

Understanding the severity level of defects in buildings can help project managers to take appropriate corrective actions. The objective of this study is to assess the severity of defects in low-rise residential buildings and develop a stochastic model for predicting the likelihood of occurrence of various categories of defects. The defects data for ground floor slabs and walls were extracted from engineering inspection reports of 252 residential buildings in Melbourne, Australia. The analyses were then carried out using Fuzzy Synthetic Evaluation (FSE) and Monte Carlo Simulation (MS) techniques. The outputs of the FSE showed that the severity index of the floor cracks was found to be 3.05 with the equivalent linguistic term of ‘slight’ or 1–2.0 mm in size. Similarly, the severity index of wall cracks was found to be 3.01 with the equivalent linguistic term of ‘slight’ or 1–5.0 mm in size. This indicates that the severity level of defects in floor and wall is low. Likewise, the findings of the simulation analysis revealed that the probability of occurrence of floor cracks with width ranging from 2 to 4 mm is 40.9%, and the chance of occurrence of wall cracks having widths ranging from 5 to 15 mm is 73.6%. The proposed models can assist the regulatory bodies and construction supervisors to assess the probability of occurrence and severity of the building defects in the ground floor slabs and walls of low-rise residential buildings. Further, this study contributes to the body of knowledge by proposing methods to assess defects in buildings.

Building Envelope Thermal Defects in Existing and Under-Construction Housing in the UAE; Infrared Thermography Diagnosis and Qualitative Impacts Analysis

The built environment accounts for the highest share of energy use and carbon emissions, particularly in emerging economies, caused by population growth and fast urbanization. This phenomenon is further exacerbated under extreme climatic conditions such as those of the United Arab Emirates, the context of this study, where the highest energy share is consumed in buildings, mostly used in the residential sector for cooling purposes. Despite efforts to curb energy consumption through building energy efficiency measures in new construction, substantial existing building stock and construction quality are left out. Construction defects, particularly in the building envelope, are recognized to affect its thermal integrity. This paper aims, first, to detect through thermography field investigation audit construction defects bearing thermal impacts in existing and under-construction residential buildings. Then, through a qualitative analysis, we identify the resulting energy, cost, and health impacts of the identified defects. Results indicate that lack or discontinuity of insulation, thermal bridging through building elements, blockwork defects, and design change discrepancies are the recurrent building and construction defects. The qualitative review analysis indicates substantial energy loss due to lack of insulation, thermal bridging with cost and health implications, while beneficial mitigation measures include consideration of building envelope retrofitting, skilled workmanship, and the call for quality management procedures during construction.

New home warranty schemes: developing a theoretical comparative framework using qualitative content analysis

PurposeThe housing construction industry is one of the most lucrative sectors for developed countries. However, homebuyers are often vulnerable when left with latent building defects in their new-build house. Many nations have thus implemented new home warranty schemes to protect consumers and stimulate residential production. These warranty programs vary excessively from state to state given the distinct nature of environments. Previous studies have attempted to compare one with another but did not apply a consistent comparative method when doing so. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the characteristics defining a new home warranty and to develop a standardised comparative framework.Design/methodology/approachAfter evaluating the characteristics outlined in multiple home warranty programs, a qualitative content analysis method was used to establish coding, categories and themes in order to create the framework. The methodology relied mostly on cross-referencing from academic papers, methodical reviews, government documents and professional consultant reports.FindingsThis paper reviewed warranty schemes from six countries: Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, France and Malaysia. The findings suggest that home warranty programs are defined by five main themes: political involvement; homeowner protection; financial sustainability; quality management; and dispute resolution. At the end, the research created a comparative framework of 101 codes that could be used to accurately measure the efficiency of a home warranty scheme.Originality/valueGathering all defining characteristics of new housing warranties into a unique comparative framework rectifies a gap in the literature. Such a flexible tool will aid future practitioners in the field to undertake comparative case study analysis through qualitative research methods.

Building Defects 2020

Ingrid Juhásová Šenitková1 Michal Kraus1 1Institute of Technology and Business in České Budĕjovice, Department of Civil Engineering, Okružní 517/10, 370 01 České Budĕjovice, Czech RepublicInfobuildingdefects@gmail.com Preface We are pleased to welcome you to the conference proceedings of the 12th International Scientific Conference on Building Defects (Building Defects 2020) held on 26th – 27th November 2020 at the Institute of Technology and Business (ITB) in České Budĕjovice, Czech Republic. The conference is organized on behalf of His Magnificence prof. Marek Vochozka, MSc., MBA., Ph.D., rector of the Institute of Technology and Business in České Budĕjovice and under the honorary patronage of the Czech Chamber of Certified Engineers and Technicians (CKAIT).The current conference is the twelfth continuous of Building Defects conferences, which solves especially the causes of defects during the building processes and afterward defects of the building themselves as well as the defect of building structures. The conference is the premier chance for the presentation of new advances and research results in the fields of civil engineering. The main aim of the conference is to present the scientific research results and its practical solutions in the field of civil engineering, taking into account the principles of sustainable development as well as to present contemporary civil engineering issues and future development.It is our pleasure to announce the participation of expert presenters from various universities and research institutes in this two-day event. A lot of thanks are given to all authors of submitted papers for their participation. They contributed a great deal of effort and creativity to produce this work. We are happy they choose the 12th Anniversary International Scientific Conference on Building Defects to present their excellent work. Thanks also to all editors and reviewers, who donated substantial time from their busy schedules to carefully read and evaluate the submitted scientific papers. The conference proceedings contain 19 papers. Each contributed paper was rigorously reviewed by two reviewers who were drawn mainly from the International Scientific Committee.List of International Scientific Committee, Organizing Committee, Sponsors are available in this pdf.

ANALYSIS OF THE CAUSES OF BUILDING DEFECTS AND ADMINISTRATIVE PROBLEMS

This article analyzes what determines the decrease in the value of real estate, physical and moral depreciation. These studies explain how environmental conditions affect buildings from the outside. The consequences of the primary change are identified and predicted. Aggressive soil causes are clarified and the expression of soil strength properties are presented. The study also specifies the procedure and administration for monitoring building defects.

Defect-based building condition assessment

Building defects accelerates the deterioration of building condition leading to more frequent repairs with increased operating and maintenance costs up to 4% or more of total construction cost per annum. Building condition assessments are carried out in order to identify defects and evaluate health status of building. However, existing assessment models are subjective, time consuming and tedious. To address the need for more objective and expeditious condition assessment this paper proposes a novel defect-based condition assessment model for existing concrete buildings considering both building physical and environmental condition. In order to deduce weighting coefficients for building defects Analytic Network Process (ANP) was used while severity of building defects is assessed using a grading scale. To incorporate uncertainty in judgement of inspection personnel, fuzzy membership functions were used to ascertain degree of belief in assessment. Evidential reasoning algorithm was used to aggregate and integrate different types of defects and to compute the overall condition assessment of building. This model is limited to concrete buildings only. The proposed model is implemented on BIM platform for exchange of information and better documentation during inspection. Proposed model was tested on a case study building and results were promising with organized inspection data management on a common BIM platform with potential to expedite inspection process while managing large amount of inspection data on handheld tablet.

Анализ дефектов жилых зданий, выявленных в период гарантийного обслуживания

The article is devoted to the analysis of defects in residential buildings identified during the warranty period. The purpose of the study is to reduce the costs of construction organizations during the warranty period of maintenance of residential buildings and improve the quality of construction. A residential complex consisting of twenty low-rise buildings was selected to study the operation of residential buildings and estimate costs. Key defects were identified and analysed. In the course of the research, a scheme of operational quality control has been developed, with the help of which it is possible to increase the level of quality management of construction and installation works, reduce the costs for construction organizations during the warranty period of service and, as a result, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Application of Deep Learning and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on Building Maintenance

Several natural and human factors are responsible for the defacement of the external walls and tiles of buildings, and the related deterioration can be a public safety hazard. Therefore, active building maintenance and repair processes are essential for ensuring building sustainability. However, conventional inspection methods are time‐, cost‐, and labor‐intensive processes. Therefore, herein, this study proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) model for image‐based automated detection and localization of key building defects (efflorescence, spalling, cracking, and defacement). Based on a pretrained CNN VGG‐16 classifier, this model applies class activation mapping for object localization. After identifying its limitations in real‐life applications, this study determined the model’s robustness and ability to accurately detect and localize defects in the external wall tiles of buildings. For real‐time detection and localization, this study applied this model by using mobile devices and drones. The results show that the application of deep learning with UAV can effectively detect various kinds of external wall defects and improve the detection efficiency.

RETRACTED: Visualization system of characteristic town building protection based on FPGA and GIS system

Abstract The ongoing development for modern cities and quality of life, coupled with computing resources, has led to increased smart city services availability. Smart cities are committed to providing residents with a better experience while reducing resource demand and pollution. As such, considered an essential factor for sustainable growth. Of the many problems that have emerged, one of the world's most critical urban issues has been traffic, which has resulted in a massive waste of time and energy and increased pollution. One of the first steps for optimized traffic in the city is to get accurate information to understand the city's traffic flow in real time. It can be achieved by applying automated video analysis, distributed throughout the city, and through a camera group's video stream. The effect of the substance on the surface, discoloration, loss of material, and air pollution can be related to contamination of structural defects and views. Whatever discoloration and air pollution defects in the structure buildings do not matter, have many coasts involved. Both peripheral and central do the processing of the image sequence. Believe that this is due to usability. Too many of the advantages of focusing on maintenance and cost in a large city are very promising strategies for effective traffic management. However, since the computational cost is a vast, high-performance computing method that is excellent in energy efficiency, it has been required. The high-performance algorithm to effectively implement real-time traffic flow information at low energy and power costs can process camera image sequence traffic.

MultiDefectNet: Multi-Class Defect Detection of Building Façade Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Defects in residential building façades affect the structural integrity of buildings and degrade external appearances. Defects in a building façade are typically managed using manpower during maintenance. This approach is time-consuming, yields subjective results, and can lead to accidents or casualties. To address this, we propose a building façade monitoring system that utilizes an object detection method based on deep learning to efficiently manage defects by minimizing the involvement of manpower. The dataset used for training a deep-learning-based network contains actual residential building façade images. Various building designs in these raw images make it difficult to detect defects because of their various types and complex backgrounds. We employed the faster regions with convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN) structure for more accurate defect detection in such environments, achieving an average precision (intersection over union (IoU) = 0.5) of 62.7% for all types of trained defects. As it is difficult to detect defects in a training environment, it is necessary to improve the performance of the network. However, the object detection network employed in this study yields an excellent performance in complex real-world images, indicating the possibility of developing a system that would detect defects in more types of building façades.

Footprints of failure: Quantifying carbon impacts of roof leakages in a single-family residential building

To meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals of climate change mitigation and sustainable cities, low-carbon or carbon-negative buildings are becoming increasingly common. The buildings are planned to compensate for the embodied energy in their materials by using low-emission materials and generating emission-free energy. Embodied energy is minimized while energy generation is maximized. However, embodied energy calculations seldom consider the risk of building defects that require repairs or early replacement of building elements. As such, a building’s sustainability is often calculated under the assumption that significant defects do not happen, which is known to rarely be the case. In this article, the material and monetary costs of repairing building defects are analysed. Findings suggest that certain building defects, like major roof leaks, have a significant carbon footprint. A large portion of this footprint can be attributed to the drying of the building after a leak is discovered. Building defects are common enough that the risk should not be neglected in life cycle analyses. Likewise, measures taken to reduce the risk of building defects, such as avoiding design solutions known to pose difficulties, may be considered as means to improve the sustainability of a building as well as reducing economic costs.