ABSTRACT
Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) foam wastes become a huge environmental issue as most of them are non-biodegradable materials and are disposed of inappropriately. It was reported that the amount of plastic and foam wastes for food containers and other packagings was evidently increased during the past 5 years, especially since the COVID19 pandemic. This work studied the development of the polymeric foam binder from the EPS foam waste for the production of green construction blocks or pavement tiles. The types of solvent (acetone and toluene) and the amount of additional EPS foam binder were investigated. The results show that the appropriate mixtures contained EPS foam binder from 15% to 30% to achieve maximum compressive strength at approximately 10 to 12 MPa with the optimal unit weight of 1,600 to 1,900 kg/m3. Those outcomes have equally passed the strength class of Thai Industrial Standard (TIS 57 and 77) for construction brick and block. This eco-friendly technique could facilitate value-added production and reduce the environmental impact of EPS wastes disposal. Moreover, it is one of the alternative approaches to promote greener and cleaner production for environmentally friendly construction materials.
ABSTRACT
With the COVID-19 epidemic situation, distance and hybrid learning happen extensively. As the demand for connectivity has dramatically increased, the campus data center operators have been forced to scale rapidly and make decisions quickly. A digital twin assists the decision-making process by providing a virtual representation of a complex system. This paper presents an application of digital twin modeling for a data center in an academic institute. The building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to represent the data center. The sensing data (i.e., temperature, humidity, energy consumption, and computing resource utilization) in the data center are collected using the network of IoT. These sensing data are visualized together with the data center model. Then, the long short-term memory (LSTM) technique is applied to predict the future room temperature. The real-time data sensing of the data center facilitates the data center operator to monitor incidents in the data center. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop and assess the real-time multiuser virtual reality (VR) application that can be used in the design review process. In particular, the application was aimed to accommodate the design review meetings conducted among participants who are in different locations, which has become commonplace during the COVID-19 outbreak. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents a methodology for the development of a real-time multiuser immersive VR application, to support remote collaboration during the design review process. The developed application can immerse remote project participants into the same virtual environment and provide virtual face-to-face discussions. An experiment was conducted with 44 university students to investigate the applicability and performance of the developed application by comparing it with the traditional approach. Findings: Results indicated that the group of students who used the developed immersive VR application outperformed the group that used the traditional approach. This was measured by the percentage of correctly identified design errors during a building inspection experiment. Originality/value: The difficulty of bringing remote stakeholders together in a virtual environment has impeded the implementation of VR technology in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. Most research has focused on the improvement of a single user’s experience. Most of the previous multiuser VR studies were conducted in other industries while similar research in the AEC industry is limited. The study presented in this paper contributes to the AEC industry by presenting the development of multiuser immersive VR applications for real-time remote collaboration and the empirical evidence to substantiate its potential benefits. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.
ABSTRACT
The social distancing measure imposed worldwide to combat the outbreak of the novel coronavirus has seen rapid adoption of technologies to support online education. Compared to traditional lecture-based courses, online teaching is particularly more challenging for laboratory courses where hands-on activities are essential to achieve the learning outcomes. To deal with this issue, the study presented in this paper was aimed to: (1) to develop a virtual reality (VR) application to aid a civil engineering laboratory course, and (2) to measure the potential of the VR-aided learning (VRAL) application in civil engineering education by assessing the learners' preferences toward VRAL compared to instructor-aided learning (IAL) and video-aided learning (VAL). Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a comparison was conducted with 21 civil engineering students from both undergraduate and graduate levels. The results indicated that VRAL was more preferable than VAL by the participants based on the aspects of “interactivity” (the ability to provide theoretical and practical learning environments to the learners), “cognitive interest” (the ability to drive learners to engage in learning activity), “ease of understanding the content” (the ability to provide a clear lecture interpretation, i.e., easy to understand), and “support for learning” (the ability to help learners to achieve the learning goal). Although VRAL was comparatively less preferable than IAL by the participants overall, it was viewed as better in terms of cognitive interest and “accessibility” (the ability to provide learners with better access to the learning approach in terms of time and location). Complementing previous research, the findings supported the benefits of VR applications to aid civil engineering education. © 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC