SAFETY AND SUSTAINABILITY IN CONSTRUCTION
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
1:30PM – 5:00PM
Moderator:
Mark Barger, Dow Chemical;
Abhishek Ambekar, Solvay Specialty Polymers
Session Abstract
Abhishek Ambekar, Solvay Specialty Polymers
The global building industry has been relying on traditional materials such as wood, stone and concrete, complemented by technical materials based on plastics that provide resistance against the elements and improve the environmental impact of buildings. Elements such as membranes, wraps, insulation, now have been integrated as part of the solutions and building codes worldwide. However, broader adoption of sophisticated materials such as composites, adaptive materials etc. allow new designs for higher performance; they also provide architects with higher degrees of freedom for more innovative designs. Although these "smart materials" are new, they continue to provide long term durability, fire resistance and other engineering properties to meet existing building codes with minimal liability. This session will explore the architects' needs for new materials, efforts to understand the behavior of materials in use and performance during fire events plus current initiative to introduce such materials in building codes.
1st Talk:
Towards a Lightweight Ontology: Carbon to Building
Prof. Mark Goulthorpe, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, MIT
Prof. Mark Goulthorpe, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, MIT
2nd Talk:
Achieving International Building Code Recognition of Polymeric Building Materials: Fire Performance Requirements
Dr. Nicholas Dembsey, Professor of Fire Protection Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)
Dr. Nicholas Dembsey, Professor of Fire Protection Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)
3rd Talk:
Designing for Fire Safety — Considerations for Product Development
Dr. Christine Lukas, Dow Chemical Services, United Kingdom
Dr. Christine Lukas, Dow Chemical Services, United Kingdom
4th Talk:
Toward Intelligent Design of Fire-safe Polymeric Products
Dr. Stanislav I. Stoliarov, University of Maryland
Dr. Stanislav I. Stoliarov, University of Maryland
5th Talk:
Reinforced Polymer Composites for Civil Infrastructure
Dr. Hota V. S. GangaRao, West Virginia University
Dr. Hota V. S. GangaRao, West Virginia University
Panel Discussion:
Safety and Sustainability in Construction: Challenges and Opportunities for Plastics
All speakers
All speakers
Towards a Lightweight Ontology: Carbon to Building
ABSTRACT
The talk will offer an overview of the perfect storm that projected global construction forecasts portend, highlighting the need for radically benign and affordable new building technologies. At issue will be the prospect of lightweight, thin-skin composite buildings as a generalized new global housing logic, offering a radical re-orientation of hydrocarbon reserves from primary use as fuel to building materials. The case will be made for the environmental, logistical and economical benefit that this could offer, and for the potential elegance of Carbonhouse in its capacity to absorb many technical functions that buildings require: a versatile carbon shroud for a versatile carbon organism — the 21st century human.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
PROF. MARK GOULTHORPE
Professor of Fire Protection Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)
Mark Goulthorpe is an Associate Professor at MIT Dept of Architecture. His current research centers on robotic fabrication and a variety of composite fabrication methodologies, as well as a new iteration of the dynamically reconfigurable HypoSurface. He is currently Head of the new Design group in the SMArchS post-professional research program.
Goulthorpe is also a practicing architect, creative and technical director of 3 groups of networked inter-disciplinary teams: dECOi Architects, HypoSurface, and Zero+. Current projects include a fully cnc-milled wooden office interior, One Main (Cambridge) evidencing a radical carbon-negative manufacturing potential; a new electromagnetic HypoSurface commission for the National Museum of Energy in Spain (NME) establishing real-time physical interactivity of architectural surfaces; the Paramorph carbon-fiber penthouse as an extension to a towertop adjacent to Tate Modern (London); and a research initiative for Zero+ thermoplastic housing. Each project probes new modes of materializing architecture via digital technologies, pressing to innovating design, fabrication and material logics to attain new formal sophistication and technical efficiencies. HypoSurface has received awards from Ars Electronica, NESTA, FEIDAD, and received a Tomorrow Award 2012 for new media. Zero+ was selected as finalist in the Mass Challenge international entrepreneurship competition 2011. The One Main project won an Architizer A+ Award Winner 2015 and an A' Platinum Award in 2016.
Prof. Goulthorpe has two published books: 'Autoplastic to Alloplastic' by Hyx/Pompidou, which evidences shifts in design methodology occasioned by digital technologies; and 'The Possibility of (an) Architecture' by Routledge, which theorizes the broad implications of a digital paradigm for architecture.
Achieving International Building Code Recognition of Polymeric Building Materials: Fire Performance Requirements
ABSTRACT
To achieve acceptance of polymeric building materials, manufacturers must be able to demonstrate to architects and engineers that their materials and related assemblies meet the fire performance requirements implicit in the International Building Code (IBC). This model code as amended locally is used extensively in the USA to regulate building design and construction. This presentation will discuss how: the IBC breaks down a building into various applications; the fire performance requirements for these applications; and the test methods used to measure performance in these applications. Successful strategies to meet fire performance requirements of applications will be discussed in a general manner.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Dr. NICHOLAS DEMBSEY
Professor of Fire Protection Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)
Dr. Nicholas Dembsey is a Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at WPI. He teaches courses in fire dynamics, fire modeling and radiation heat transfer. His scholarship interests are primarily focused on fire characteristics of building materials and assemblies. He is especially interested in new materials such as fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) for modern building construction. He is a member of SPE and ACMA. At ACMA he chaired the task force that introduced FRP into the International Building Code 2009 Edition. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Fire Technology and Fire and Materials journals.
Designing for Fire Safety — Considerations for Product Development
ABSTRACT
Fire performance, along with desired chemical and physical properties, is another of the key characteristics for a product to meet when offering a plastic product to market especially in the building and transport application area. While product development starts with identifying and developing a product to meet initial key performance indicators this cannot ultimately be assessed in isolation. It is important to consider not only how a material will perform in small scale fire tests (e.g. ignitability, flame spread and heat release) but also how a related product will perform in a fire test in an application when it incorporates the material with other components, including facings and fixings. This paper will introduce the assessment of fire performance from an R&D perspective and from the need to meet required fire performance standards. Fire testing of products is one aspect of a holistic approach to ensure fire safety in building and construction where other fire safety provisions such as active and passive measures (including sprinklers, means of escape, smoke detectors) also play their part and provide a multi-layer approach to ensuring safety in case of fire.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
DR. CHRISTINE LUKAS
Dow Chemical Services, United Kingdom
Dr. Christine Lukas is a Product Stewardship & Fire Safety Manager in Dow Building Solutions in Dow Chemical Services in the UK. She started her career working for UK Dept. of Environment at the BRE Fire Research Station. She has been with Dow since 1990 starting in R&D formulation. In 2005 she moved over to EH&S function in DBS to work on environmental, regulatory and fire safety matters, advising different businesses. She is present in a number of European Industry Associations on fire safety. Dr Lukas also works in the European and International standardisation area on fire testing of construction products and leads ISOTC92 Sub-committee 1 on fire test methods for initiation and growth.
She is the author of a number of technical papers on fire safety and a member of the Editorial Board of the Fire and Materials Journal. She recently received the Gold Award from the British Plastics Federation (BPF) for outstanding contributions to the plastics industry in the field of fire safety and issues management.
Dr Lukas holds a BSc. Hons in Chemistry and Biochemistry, MSc and PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Salford UK.
Toward Intelligent Design of Fire-safe Polymeric Products
ABSTRACT
One of the main challenges associated with development of new polymeric materials capable of meeting existing and emerging flammability standards is identification and quantification of physical and chemical mechanisms controlling fire growth on these materials. During the past several years, my group has been working on an array of measurement techniques that provide quantitative insight into the phenomena that govern material flammability. These techniques are based on standard instrumentation, including thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry and microscale combustion calorimetry, as well as several unique instruments developed in our laboratory, including Milligram-scale Flame Calorimetry (MFC) and Controlled Atmosphere Pyrolysis Apparatus (CAPA). Together, these techniques are able to characterize all essential condensed-phase and gas-phase processes responsible for the material's fire behavior. A numerical modeling framework, ThermaKin, combining a detailed transient pyrolysis model with an empirical representation of heat feedback from a surface flame, has also been developed to translate the results of characterization to predictions of fire growth in standard testing scenarios. A considerable success has been achieved in modeling bench-scale standard flammability tests and an ongoing work is focused on expanding this approach to full-scale tests, such as the NFPA 286 Room Corner. It is expected that this effort will not only produce a systematic methodology to compute material behavior in large-scale fire tests based on the data obtained from relatively small-scale experiments, but also will deliver a capability to quantitatively relate material composition to this behavior and thus enable determination of optimum material composition through calculations, bypassing ineffective and costly trial-and-error testing.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
DR. STANISLAV I. STOLIAROV
University of Maryland
Dr. Stanislav I. Stoliarov received M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology (Moscow, Russia) and Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC, USA). For his Ph.D., Stanislav performed experimental and computational studies of fundamental mechanisms of reactions involving radicals important in combustion and evolution of planetary atmospheres. Before joining the Fire Protection Engineering Department of the University of Maryland in 2010, Stanislav spent 8 years working as a researcher for the Ultra Fire Resistant Materials Research Program conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration. At the Federal Aviation Administration, Stanislav developed computational tools for the modeling of polymer pyrolysis, including MD_REACT and ThermaKin. Stanislav also made significant contributions to the development of the Microscale Combustion Calorimetry (a new ASTM standard for the measurement of material flammability). At Maryland, Stanislav teaches a range of upper level undergraduate and graduate classes on the topics of fire dynamics and fire modeling. His research group is engaged in a broad spectrum of activities focused on development of experimental and computational approaches to the analysis of flammability of polymeric and composite solids and fire safety of electrical and electronic devices.
Reinforced Polymer Composites for Civil Infrastructure
ABSTRACT
The research, development and demonstration (RDD) work on glass and carbon fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites for bridges, buildings and hydraulic structures has been gaining attention through the Constructed Facility Center (CFC) of West Virginia University. This RDD has focused on 3 broad areas: 1) FRP reinforcing bars in lieu of steel rebars for concrete decks and FRP composite wraps over concrete or timber beams, piers and pier caps; 2) All FRP composite modular building systems, utility poles and fender piles and 3) hydraulic structures such as miter gates, miter blocks, wicket gates, trash panels and underwater wrapping.
The conclusion of our research is that advanced fiber reinforced polymer composite systems are performing well and are competitive in terms of life cycle costs when compared with conventional materials such as steel and concrete. The field data reveals the superiority of structural durability of FRP systems as long as the design and construction details are attended to by rigorously adhering to engineering principles.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
DR. HOTA V. S. GANGARAO
West Virginia University
Dr. Hota V. S. GangaRao is the Maurice A. & JoAnn Wadsworth Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at West Virginia University. He first joined WVU in 1969 after obtaining a M. Sc. and Ph. D. in Civil Engineering from North Carolina State University. He also holds a B. Sc. Degree in Civil Engineering from IIT Madras, India.
Dr GangaRao's area of research includes the design, development, production and implementation of fiber reinforced polymer composites in infrastructure, including recycled polymers for constructed facilities with emphasis on high structures, utility poles and underground structures. Since 2008, he has been Director of the National Science Foundation Center for Integration of Composites into Infrastructure.
Dr GangaRao is a Registered Professional Engineer (Structural Engineering), a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and of the Structural Engineering Institute of ASCE. He has authored over 350 technical papers, two textbooks and 11 US patents.
