Volume 2 Issue 2
Authors: V.K. Bansal; Satish Kumar
Abstract: The construction industry involves risky and unhealthy operations which result in many human tragedies, discourage workers, disrupt construction, delay progress, and adversely affect cost, productivity, and reputation. Construction managers focus mainly on productivity in terms of cost, quality, and time. Construction project can never achieve its objectives unless construction professionals become aware of the safety-related issues. The main objective behind this paper was to create awareness among practitioners about various safety-related practices in the construction industry. Paper discusses the possible construction site hazards along with their root causes. The significance of safety culture and climate in the mitigation of site hazards has also been discussed. Paper highlights the role of owners and designers to ensure safe construction process. Applications of information technology (IT) based tools in ensuring safety during construction have also been reviewed. Beside this, attention has been drawn towards the importance of safe site layout in ensuring safety. The concepts of prevention through design (PtD) and safety into sustainability have also been elaborated.
Keywords: Construction Safety; Safe Practices; IT
Authors: Masashi Ichimiya; Kunihiko Ishihara
Abstract: Lined ducts are widely used to reduce the noise generated from various equipments such as large wind tunnels and exhaust pipes of engines. Especially, noise reduction is required in offices and hospitals accompanying with the spread of air conditioning equipment. The noise reduction of non-lined ducts is usually predicted by using the FEM and the BEM techniques. However, there were a few cases that the analytic value was compared with the actual measurement of the lined duct which the noise absorbing material was used. In this research, the analytic value of BEM was compared with the actual measurement value for the attenuation quantity within a lined duct. Then, a noticeable gap was caused between both results in specific frequency. Thus, the cause was probed with a viewpoint of the specific acoustic impedance ratio used for BEM. As a result, it was found that the prediction of sound attenuation of the duct agrees with the experimental result by applying the impedance measured by the impedance tube with φ100 diameter to the BEM analysis.
Keywords: Sound and Acoustics; Noise Control; Boundary Element Method; Environmental Engineering
Authors: Seiichi Miura; Shima Kawamura
Abstract: In order to elucidate failure mechanisms of volcanic slopes with crushable particles due to rainfall and freeze-thaw action, a series of rainfall tests were performed on model volcanic slopes having several water contents and slope angles. In the consideration of model test results, it was found that surface slope failures were changed depending strongly on both slope angle and the initial water content. Furthermore, it was shown that the softening of the slopes by freeze-thaw action is important for evaluating the stability of volcanic slopes; in particular, its effect is attributed to the reduction of the shearing resistance due to particle breakage, and cannot be ignored for evaluation of slope stability.
Keywords: Slope stability; volcanic soils; freezing and thawing; model tests