Modular Growth forecast for next 6 years

The global modular and prefabricated buildings market is set for growth over the next six years, as offsite construction gains traction thanks to its sustainable approach, according to Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis

A global uptick in construction activities and significant cost, labour, and time savings in offsite construction are key factors driving market revenues toward $215bn (£167bn) by 2025.

With a constantly evolving regulatory landscape, adopting more environmentally sustainable and regulatory-compliant construction practices will boost prospects and revenues in the more mature markets of Western Europe and North America. Frost & Sullivan expects the market to expand at a sturdy CAGR of 6.3% from 2018-2025.

Prathmesh Limaye, senior analyst of chemicals & materials in infrastructure & mobility at Frost & Sullivan, said: “Despite increased construction costs from an offsite construction, a net saving of up to 7% is possible because of shortened construction periods.

“In addition, prefabricated buildings are increasingly being perceived as sustainable solutions for construction projects due to a growing usage of materials, such as timber and aluminium composites, that are more energy-efficient than concrete.

From a regional perspective, the recovering economies of Latin America along with high-growth markets of Eastern Europe, India, and Southeast Asia are expected to provide lucrative market opportunities. Slower growth is anticipated in North America and Europe due to increased construction activities in developing regions.

From a competitor position, the market is highly fragmented with several regional and smaller suppliers with wide market coverage due to the relative ease of setting up a business in this space. The offsite construction industry is, therefore, slated to experience consolidation with multiple merger and acquisition activities occurring in the foreseeable future.

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Limaye added: “Many small and regional participants influence the overall pricing and distribution patterns in regional markets, especially in Latin America, the Middle-East, and Asia-Pacific.”

To gain a competitive advantage, Limaye recommends players emulate innovative companies such as Katerra and Welement, and adopt automation and design tools to increase the quality and precision in their construction.

Additional growth opportunities participants should aim to secure include:

  • Manufacturers promoting more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable solutions that are compliant with regulations mandated by international organisations.
  • Gaining wider coverage by improving their portfolios with products that can be customised to end-user specifications and also promote ease of installation.
  • Expanding operations into high-growth regions such as Asia-Pacific due to the region’s growing infrastructure and construction development.
  • Offering products that are comparative with those offered by regional and local manufacturers.

Limaye concluded: “Despite significant market expansion prospects, perceptions surrounding the high initial cost of construction and transportation, design rigidity, multiple stakeholder involvement, and lack of skilled labour are key factors slowing adoption rates and hindering market growth.”

 

Source: PBC TODAY

 

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100% Global Renewable Energy System – Calling Elon Musk

Recently, headlines were made when an Australian team published a study finding that there was more than enough pumped hydro storage resource locations to satisfy all future needs for storage in a 100% renewable grid. As the global resource map site hosted at the Australia National Museum says:

 

“We found about 616,000 potentially feasible PHES sites with storage potential of about 23 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by using geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This is about one hundred times greater than required to support a 100% global renewable electricity system.”

 

In other words, we only need to use about 1% of the global pumped hydro resource locations to satisfy our needs. Furthermore, pumped hydro can store energy for weeks and the round trip from electricity to elevated water to electricity is 80% to 90% efficient. It’s already by far the largest form of utility-scale storage in the world, with more than 160 GW of rated capacity of pumped hydro in operation as of the end of 2016.

NREL published a report on the value of pumped hydro in 2018 that’s worth quoting a couple of bits from:

“PSH is a highly flexible, low-marginal-cost, and fast-acting generation asset, and in the market simulations, it was shown to reduce system-wide operational costs in both the day-ahead and real-time markets”

“In all market simulations, the addition of PSH significantly reduced the annual operating costs for the test system. Cost savings ranged from 1.2% to 2.8% in the day-ahead market simulations and between 3.9% to 10% in the real-time simulations.”

Sounds like we have a winner. It’s a rock solid technology, first deployed in the 1890s. It may be dull, but it works, it’s simple, and it’s effective. It saves money on the grid. And as the Australian study showed, there’s absurdly more of the resource than we possibly need.

 

So why are there regular claims that pumped hydro won’t suffice?

 

I published The Short List Of Climate Actions That Will Work, and pointed to pumped hydro as a primary storage mechanism that needed to be developed. Comments on that piece included derogatory comments about pumped hydro. Similarly, in my assessment of the climate action plans of the leading Democratic candidates, none call for pumped hydro, but for more R&D into storage, with the intent to reduce costs below battery storage. Since pumped hydro is already below battery storage costs, it’s a head-scratching situation.

Recently, a South African representative of an innovative company in the space reached out to me based on my piece, Joi Scientific’s Perpetual Hydrogen Illusion Comes Tumbling Down. As with many of my clients, the company wanted an independent read on its technology to understand how it fits and whether they are missing something in their analysis.

The premise of their innovation is straightforward. If you use a big rock or concrete plug in a shaft full of liquid, you can use pumped hydro technology to move the plug up and down. Imagine a missile silo that’s generating electricity, instead of hiding an ICBM. This allows a much bigger weight with fewer mechanical construction challenges. I did a little due diligence to see if there was any way that I could add value. I reviewed their material, their patent, asked a few questions, and realized that their solution was solid.

The discussion triggered me to think about the Boring Company and Tesla Energy, and the characteristics of Tesla’s Powerpack battery solution. It’s an excellent same-day solution for fast response energy, but the characteristics that make it good for duck curves with solar don’t make it good for longer lasting storage. It’s getting cheaper, but it’s still not a cheap form of larger scale storage.

When I did an assessment of the viability of a large-scale, carbon-neutral, secure greenhouse in Canada for a client this year, the Powerpack component of the solution was the most expensive portion if the solution had to remain off grid, and that solution included a 100,000 sq ft high-tech greenhouse, 3 MW of LEDs, a few acres of solar panels and a very big ground-source heat pump, all of which are capital intensive components by themselves. Powerpack’s 4-hour efficiency is 85%, but it’s not so good at 72 hours.

I asked Jim Fiske, the founder and CEO of Gravity Power and the person whose name the patents are in, about the Tesla connection. They had had conversation with Musk about this, but among other things, the shaft diameter that the Boring Company drills are too small for economically viable models.

“The net result of all these considerations is that very large Gravity Power Plants (multiple gigawatt-hours) are extremely cost effective, while very small ones are generally not cost competitive. When I say “cost effective,” I mean the levelized cost of GPP storage is roughly five times lower than li-ion battery plants.”

 

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Between the conversations and the publications, I decided it was time to go deeper on the global study that had come out of Australia recently. Among other things, I was curious to see if it was another example of machine learning in the climate solution space, something I’m digging into as a series leading to a formal CleanTechnica report. The peer-reviewed paper on the global study isn’t out yet, but it’s an extension of an Australia-specific study published in 2018. That study is Geographic information system algorithms to locate prospective sites for pumped hydro energy storage by Lu, Stocks, et al., in the journal Applied Energy.

I realized quickly that there was a disconnect between how most people think of pumped hydro and what the study was saying, a disconnect that might be leading to dismissal of pumped hydro as a large-scale solution.

Outside of interesting innovations such as Gravity Power, there are three types of pumped hydro. One of them has characteristics that mean that it can take 15 years to gain approvals and build. Two of them don’t share those characteristics and are much faster to approve and build. The study focused specifically on the latter two, meaning that the 100x more resource than required is specifically for easier to site and faster to develop resource. That’s a very good news story.

Let’s look at the first type of pumped hydro, open-loop, to gain an understanding of the challenges. That form of pumped hydro is continuously connected to a naturally flowing water feature. That means building a dam, creating a large reservoir, and diverting water that flowed through the environment to power generation. That has a large number of environmental impacts, and is also highly subject to strong pushback from the public downstream and upstream of the facility, who typically and reasonably like the water flowing the way it is and the land unsubmerged. The large majority of the 160 GW of pumped hydro storage that exists today is open-loop.

That’s the form that takes 15 years to build, if it manages to get built at all.

However, the authors of the study focused on two types of closed-loop pumped hydro, dry-gully and turkey-nest.

 
Image RE100 Group Austrailian National University

 

The top diagram shows a dry-gully pumped hydro siting. As the name suggests, this is a land feature that is suitable for damming, but one that has no water running through it. As such, upper and lower reservoirs can be created and filled without impeding water flow, damaging streams or damaging habitat and wildlife that depend on the flowing water.

The bottom diagram shows the turkey’s-nest pumped hydro cross section. It’s called that because turkeys make their nests on the ground, building up the sides. The turkey’s-nest option is suitable for flatter land, where a dry gully doesn’t exist. Flatter doesn’t mean flat as a pancake of course, but one with a gentler decline from a higher elevation to a lower elevation, so that two turkey’s nest reservoirs can be excavated, the earth used to build up the walls and connected with a bored tunnel for two-way flow of water.

The study’s authors refer to this type of pumped hydro as short-term off river energy storage (STORES), and their modeling is based on this. They explicitly looked for resources with excellent characteristics for rapid development.

“STORES is located away from rivers and has little impacts on the environment and natural landscape due to: (1) no interaction with the ecosystem of main stem rivers, (2) no conflicts or competition with nature reserves and intensive land uses and, (3) medium-sized reservoirs located within close proximity to electricity infrastructure and renewable energy resources.”

Being in British Columbia, I’m familiar with reservoir sizes for hydroelectric sites, and know that they are very big indeed. The 800 MW capacity Site C Dam that’s being developed in northeastern BC on the Peace River near the border with Alberta, for example, will have a reservoir that’s 93 square kilometers, or 36 square miles. That’s an area that would cover most of San Francisco, and one that’s quite a bit bigger than Manhattan for perspective. It’s a fifth the size of Lake Tahoe.

The reservoir needs to be that big to enable a sufficient head — the vertical distance between intake and discharge  — for effective generation. When most people think of hydroelectric, that’s what they think of, huge reservoirs that inundate a lot of land that often had people, culturally significant elements, or agriculture on it, lots of concrete, and a downstream that’s radically altered. But that’s not what STORES is.

“PHES system with twin 100 hectares (ha), 1 gigalitre (GL) reservoirs separated by a height difference of 500 m is able to contribute 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) of storage capacity (assuming an usable fraction of 85% and an efficiency of 90%), or 200 MW of power with 5 hours of storage to the electricity system – equivalent to a large gas-fired power plant.”

They looked for very high-head sites, where the vertical head makes a big difference for the amount of energy that can be stored. After all, it’s a gravity system, and the higher the head, the higher the potential energy of water. It takes more energy to lift a kilogram 10 meters than 1 meter, and you get more energy back.

The minimum head that they looked for in the study was 300 meters. Site C, for comparison, has a 50-meter head. That means that the reservoirs can be a lot smaller. The example above, at 100 hectares for each reservoir, is only a square kilometer or about 0.4 square miles. That’s a tenth of a percent of the size of the Site C Dam reservoir. That’s less than a third the size of Central Park in NYC or a quarter of the size of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The dam walls were modeled at a maximum of 40 meters (130 ft) for the dry-gully sites and 20 meters (65 ft) for the turkey’s nest sites. These aren’t trivial structures, but for comparison, the Oroville Dam in California is 234 meters (770 ft). By hydroelectric standards, they are modest.

So these are small reservoirs that don’t block rivers or streams, that are sited away from nature reserves and parks, that are sited near transmission lines, that are sited near high renewable energy resource areas and are capable of providing GWh capacity storage. The round trip efficiency is 80% to 90%, and storage can be for days or weeks, although typically its most economical for next day grid balancing per the NREL study. This contrasts to Tesla’s Powerpack which is currently very effective at in-day balancing, soaking up mid-day solar for end of day peaks.

There are two observations. The first is that siting approval for sites like this should be a lot faster and less controversial than for hydroelectric dams in general. Among other things, I wondered if the global siting study was able to have access to detailed data on sensitive or preserved natural areas of the same quality as the Australian study. I reached out to one of the study’s primary authors, Matt Stocks, and he told me:

“We use the World Protected Area Database for environmental exclusions. We haven’t had any issues with this brought to our attention. The land use is more difficult.  Our only land use exclusion is regions of high urban density.  It is not perfect with a number of smaller towns around he world inundated.”

I was reassured that the environmental approvals would not be challenged outside of Australia. The smaller town challenge should be trivial to resolve given that there are 100x more sites than required, so as the resource database is assessed by countries, they can eliminate sites with towns using country data. There’s also a proviso in the online mapping resource that geological, tectonic, and engineering work still needed to be done to validate each potential site. Many won’t be viable for reasons of slope stability and the like.

I was also curious if he had a perspective on whether siting approval was faster with STORES.

​”The individual states in Australia manage the main approvals and have regulatory responsibility for the electricity system.  NSW has released a pumped hydro road map and SA are supporting a number of proposals there.  The approval processes for wind and solar have been significantly streamlined through the states formalising the approval process and this appears to be emerging in Australia for pumped hydro.

In other words, yes. Standardizing on STORES gets us on track and allows streamlined approvals. Since we need a lot of movement by 2030, this is excellent news and something that’s replicable in every country.

Is it enough for the US? Well, what are the requirements? Per ANU:

“An approximate guide to storage requirements for 100% renewable electricity, based on analysis for Australia, is 1 Gigawatt (GW) of power per million people with 20 hours of storage, which amounts to 20 GWh per million people. This is for a strongly-connected large-area grid (1 million km2) with good wind and solar resources in a high-energy-use country.”

And what is the resource size for the United States? The study shows that the United States has about 4,500 GWh of potential STORES sites per million people, over 200 times what is expected to be required.

And those stores are close to major population centers for the most part. If some of the flatter states would like pumped storage, Gravity Power is happy to oblige. They are excellent for flat land siting and have even lower environmental impact concerns than STORES.

What else is true about a lot of those locations?

There are a lot of coal workers in those regions who know how to work rock. Building pumped hydro is strongly aligned to their technical and engineering skill set. And there are 60,000 or more of them who want good work, and would prefer it be not too far from where their families are. I keep suggesting that Democratic candidates should make this a campaign plank, but I haven’t seen any uptake yet. I’ve asked this question of Ike Kirby, PhD and Kamala Harris’ environmental policy advisor, but haven’t had a response yet.

But back to Elon Musk. As I pointed out earlier, the Boring Company isn’t well suited for Gravity Power’s large-diameter shaft requirement. But what about closed-loop pumped hydro as identified by the STORES study? Pumped hydro requires tunnels, not a huge shaft. The tunnels range from 4.5 to 8 meters per existing sites and a Springer study.

What does the Boring Company do? It bores 4.3-meter finished shafts. What does Tesla Energy do? It does energy storage. Start at the bottom, point the Line-Storm upward to the upper reservoir, start it up and use the resulting tunnel rock and soil in the earthen bulwarks of the reservoirs. What else is good for closed-loop pumped hydro? Covering material of some sort to reduce evaporation so that you don’t have to top them up that often, which strikes me as an excellent use case for Tesla’s commercial solar panels, floating on the placid waters of the upper and lower reservoirs. Seems like a no-brainer. So I reached out to Elon.

No response yet. If he does respond, I’m sure that will make for an interesting discussion.

Closing off, when I started reading the detailed study, I was curious to see if the approach used took advantage of machine learning or not. And it doesn’t. It’s a geographical algorithmic search process that first excludes a bunch of areas first, then does specific calculations about potentially viable spots. It’s computationally intensive, but using classic techniques, not neural-net techniques. This isn’t to say it doesn’t embody a good deal of insight and innovation, just not that specific type. I asked Matt Stocks why machine learning hadn’t been used for this particular solution.

“Machine learning works really well for large data sets where the machine learning algorithms can learn from one set of data and extrapolate to another. I don’t think there are sufficient examples of closed loop schemes to be able to train the algorithms. And once there is a reservoir there, we can’t see what the land underneath it looks like anymore since the elevation measurements will refer to the water level instead of the ground.”

This aligns well when compared to the CoastalDEM machine learning effort I covered recently which found much larger coastal risk of extreme water levels than had previously been understood. That study had both a global NASA SRTM dataset equivalent to what Stocks et al. used, but they also had a high-quality set of lidar data readings for much of the United States and Australia’s coastline to train it with. The number of existing dry-gully and turkey’s nest pumped hydro sites is small and there’s no equivalent to the lidar data set to correct the elevation and find similar features elsewhere.

So there we have it. Pumped hydro is a highly viable storage technology, it overlaps nicely with the characteristics of Tesla’s existing battery technology, the Boring Company has high-speed tunneling equipment suitable for penstocks, and there are a lot of excellent coal miners who could be repurposed close to home in the United States. Seems like a winner to me indeed.

About the Author

Michael Barnard is Chief Strategist with TFIE Strategy Inc. He works with startups, existing businesses and investors to identify opportunities for significant bottom line growth and cost takeout in our rapidly transforming world. He is editor of The Future is Electric, a Medium publication. He regularly publishes analyses of low-carbon technology and policy in sites including Newsweek, Slate, Forbes, Huffington Post, Quartz, CleanTechnica and RenewEconomy, and his work is regularly included in textbooks. Third-party articles on his analyses and interviews have been published in dozens of news sites globally and have reached #1 on Reddit Science. Much of his work originates on Quora.com, where Mike has been a Top Writer annually since 2012.

 

Source: CleanTechnica

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Simpson strong-tie introduces their all-new catalogue of connectors for timber and masonry construction

Leading construction connector manufacturer Simpson Strong-Tie has released their all-new 2020 catalogue; a comprehensive product guide which showcases the company’s most recent innovations and product line extensions.

 

Alongside the UK’s largest collection of connectors for timber and masonry construction, sit numerous new products, including the GPC, Gable Panel Connector, a high movement timber frame tie, decorative and a heavy duty post bases, an adjustable mini hanger, purlin anchor, twisted restraint strap and a 4mm reinforced angle bracket.

The catalogue also contains comprehensive technical data, performance characteristics, safe working loads, plus easy to follow installation instructions.

Managing Director, Malcolm Paulson explains: “It’s been a busy time for Simpson Strong-Tie, we’ve really pushed the boat out to increase our core product range, engineered to stand the test of time.

With our new enhanced product lines, along with our rapid made-to-order service, we really can say that if we don’t have it – you don’t need it”.

Available now in print on request, and online in the Resources / Literature section at the below website.

www.strongtie.co.uk

 

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PTG: a Perfect Fit for Modular Businesses

When Performance Technology Group was formed at the beginning of 2018, it was envisioned as a means of bringing together a varied and industry-leading product portfolio, interdisciplinary expertise and nationwide fabrication and distribution capabilities into a single-point-of-access, customer-focused offering

 

The emphasis was on offering economies of scale and reducing complexity for the customer. Why spread your personnel across multiple meetings and multiple locations to discuss the fire, thermal and acoustic requirements of your project when PTG can address your needs over the course of a single engagement, with all the right people brought to the table? Before a single product has been delivered to site, this unified approach is saving you time, money and reducing the likelihood of error by removing unnecessary complexity.

Whilst offsite construction was very much on the PTG radar, it was only in the sense that the entire construction industry was on the PTG radar: commercial, residential, industrial, health, education hospitality, retail; from site protection, right at the outset of a project, through foundation work, from building envelope development to final fit-out.

Nationwide Fabrication Facilities

As PTG began to catalogue its business assets, it soon became apparent it possessed phenomenal fabrication facilities penetrating all areas of the UK, from Scotland, down through the North of England, through the Midlands to London, the South East and the South West.

All of these facilities were positioned in prime locations to serve their regions, but more impressive was the sheer breadth of technology and machinery available.

This is just a selection of what PTG have to offer: band saws, beams saws, CNC machines, cold-wire saws, guillotines, horizontal saws, hot-wire cutters, lamella cutters, multisaws, panel saws, pillar drills, profilers, routers, slitting machines, slotting machines and spindle moulders. This comprehensive suite of equipment enables PTG to cut materials to any size and thickness, provide intricate edge and joint detailing, face grooving, pre-drilled holes, duct cut-outs and a wide range of bonding and laminating solutions. And it’s all operated and lovingly maintained by a crew of skilled and experienced personnel, and augmented by a raft of hand-finishing tools and techniques.

 

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Materials and Supply

The fabrication facilities are set up to work with almost any material the modular construction industry can throw at it, from cement particle board to stone wool, from high-performance cladding panels to glass-fibre board, to produce bespoke flooring, ceiling and internal and external wall solutions.

A 2003 academic paper by A.G.F. Gibb and F. Isack – Re-engineering through pre-assembly: client expectations and drivers – was the result of interviews with major construction clients and identified, amongst many other things, that a “limited and disjointed supply chain” was a negative factor in relation to their projects.

PTG have supplied to some of the largest, logistically demanding construction projects in the UK, priding themselves on their reputation for uninterrupted supply, via strategically designated regional and local hubs and depots, and by creating and maintaining effective long-term relationships with a carefully selected group of manufacturers and suppliers.

Running in tandem with PTG’s product acquisition and the development of robust supply chains is a strong commitment to product testing, across fire, thermal and acoustic performance standards, with several senior members of our team involved with key industry bodies such as the Institute of Acoustics.

Mark Fyfe, Group Sales and Business Development Director for Performance Technology Group, said, “PTG can ‘plug-in’ to any modular contractor’s manufacturing and fabricating processes, effectively becoming a seamless part of their production line. Not only can we supply made-to-measure materials, we can supply a sequenced kit of parts or pre-assembled system components, potentially allowing a modular builder to rationalise their own asset base and reduce capital expenditure.”

Kara Windsor, PTG’s primary contact for all modular enquiries, said, “Modular construction is driven by an enthusiasm for efficiency, attention-to-detail, cost-effectiveness and, most importantly, innovation. PTG share all these values, making us the perfect fit for modular businesses.”

www.performancetechnologygroup.com

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Pushing the envelope on building envelope construction

From architects to specifiers, installer to contractors, every player in the build chain must do their part in creating thermally efficient buildings, and that starts with the building envelope’s construction, explains Andy Stolworthy, Director of Product and Market Development.

With environmental legislation for building design and construction being updated across the globe, a new wave of architecture is being introduced. Architects and specifiers must find ways they can speed up building timelines, reduce energy usage and enhance a building’s lifespan when designing commercial and residential buildings.

The UK is making substantive improvements to its energy codes in order to reduce energy usage and wastage, seeing the construction industry shift towards bioclimatic architecture. Thermally efficient buildings using a well designed and installed envelope are crucial to this movement.

 

 

The building envelope is a protective boundary between the interior and exterior of a building that ‘wraps’ around the walls, floor, roof, windows and doors. This envelope shields the exterior of the building from natural elements, whilst facilitating climate control and protecting the indoor environment

Solutions that envelope energy efficiency

When a building envelope isn’t installed properly or is poorly specified, it will contribute to a substantial amount of energy loss, and one area that should not be neglected is the roof. More than 30% of heat is lost through the roof, and flat roofs particularly are prone to energy loss when a poor design is chosen.

There are two types of flat roof, warm and cold, the difference is the positioning of the insulation layer. In a warm roof the insulation is placed on top of the roof structure and choosing the right fastening solution will minimise the thermal bridging. This bridging is a funnel of unobstructed heat flow, which renders the surrounding layers of thermal insulation useless and ultimately can damage the building’s structure.

To prevent this, it is imperative the correct fastening solutions are used that work with the roofing system. Flat roofing solutions such as the Isotak thermally broken sleeve and fastener from SFS will ensure that the cladding is properly secured, therefore avoiding thermal bridges and decreasing energy loss.

The two-part fastener sits inside a polypropylene or polymide sleeve which penetrates below the surface of the insulation, providing a barrier between the fastener head and the external atmospheric conditions. This improves the whole roof’s thermal efficiency and reduces heat transfer through the building envelope.

The materials of the fixtures and fittings is another overlooked factor that contributes to excessive heat loss. Stainless-steel conducts heat at a slower pace than carbon steel which not only improves the thermal efficiency of the envelope but allows for improved corrosion-resistance, thereby maintaining the integrity of the installation and performance for longer. Installers should only use system approved fasteners and consult with manufacturers to identify the right fastener for the right situation.

Faster fixings that envelope efficiency

The building envelope is made up of a variety of different parts that make up a system – using the correct parts throughout will ensure a smooth building process. When the incorrect components are used, efficiency can go down as the wrong components can lead to unforeseen complications.

In the instance of a rainscreen subframe system, the manufacturer will typically just design solutions to meet mechanical and thermal needs. SFS’s NVELOPE system on the other hand will design everything down to the frame fastener to ensure the façade performs. Here is a perfect example where the right fasteners and fixings are paired with the right brackets and subframe systems and both construction and energy efficiencies increase.

Newer generations of fasteners, fixtures and brackets are being developed to aid a quick and easy installation too. For example, the SXC5 fastener is a self-drilling composite fastener that has been re-engineered to have an optimised tip and thread geometry, allowing installers to drive the fixing into the material they are fixing quicker.

As suppliers and installers enter this new wave of bioclimatic architecture, they must work together to ensure a successful construction of the building envelope. From training to on-site technical assistance and specifying the right components, all parties can secure the future of the building, speed up timelines and enhance its thermal performance.

www.sfsintec.co.uk

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Simplifying airtightness in modular & offsite construction

The A. Proctor Group has, for over 50 years, been serving the construction industry with an extensive portfolio of technically advanced thermal insulation, specialist membranes and vapour control layers, providing an extensive range of superior high-performance products suitable for modular and off-site construction.

 

The basis of best practice in modular construction comes from an understanding of the relevant building regulations and a holistic approach to the building design. In doing so we consider six core aspects in the process related to the balance of Heat Air Moisture Management (HAMM):

  • Building
  • Weather
  • Occupants
  • Heat
  • Air
  • Moisture

Building

The first area to consider is the type of building fabric involved. Concrete, steel and timber-based buildings all respond differently to moisture and contain different amounts of construction moisture which must be allowed to dry out. For example, buildings with a lot of in-situ concrete can take several years to fully dry out, this excess moisture load must be accounted for at the design stage.

Weather

Construction moisture can also come from the weather, and this must also be taken into account along with the weather conditions the building will be subjected to once completed. Being weather tight earlier in the construction process and generally being composed of drier materials, offsite construction has an important hygrothermal advantage.

Occupants

By reducing the initial moisture loading on the building fabric, the design can be more precisely tailored to manage moisture associated with the occupants of the building and the uses the building will be put to, leading in turn to a more efficient fabric envelope and building system.

The influences of these three aspects can then be assessed in terms of the heat, air and moisture movement within the building. This takes into account the heating of the building, as well as the air leakage effects and response of the building fabric to the absorption and desorption of moisture. Factors such as the position and performance of the fabric insulation can also be considered.

 

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To ensure our design adequately manages these complex interactions, we undertake a hygrothermal analysis of the building fabric using software called WUFI. This breaks the building elements into individual layers and calculates the temperatures, moisture flow and degree of water storage at any point in the building fabric. This detailed analysis allows us to consider solutions that may mean that the internal vapour control layer can be removed altogether without creating a condensation risk.

This is made possible by the use of an external vapour permeable air barrier membrane. The Wraptite® membrane self adheres to the external face of the sheathing and provides a robust airtight layer without compromising moisture movement through the wall assembly.

By removing the vapour control in favour of an external air leakage solution we remove the associated material and installation costs, and more importantly, we remove the need to seal all the service penetrations, meaning we have a more reliable air barrier and can reduce the air leakage rates applied at the design stage.

In modular systems, incorporating an external air barrier is simple and brings several benefits over traditional mechanically fixed membranes.

Wraptite membrane can be applied to the panels in any orientation, and being self-adhered requires no mechanical fixings. This adhesion reduces the potential for membrane damage both during the module assembly process and while in transit to the site.

The panels are then assembled and the joints taped using Wraptite Tape, ensuring no adhesion issues or tape compatibility problems, and the panel assembly is now resistant to air leakage. The wall, roof and floor panels can then be assembled into modules, and Wraptite split-liner tape used to complete the airtight seal between adjacent assemblies. The completed modules can then be transported to site with full protection from the elements.

www.proctorgroup.com

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Off-site Manufacturing – best way to accommodate student intake

Although provision of student accommodation, both in the private sector and university has increased over the last five years, demand for quality accommodation remains high.

 

When considering the provision of purpose built student accommodation timescales are frequently tight, with investors looking for a quick return on their investment.

Premier Modular, is an off-site manufacturer with over 60 years’ experience in the market, with a strong commitment to research and development, ensuring they bring the most innovative products to market, for both hire and sale.

Premier Modular has developed a highly efficient light gauge steel frame based factory engineered product.   Constructed by skilled assembly teams in Premier’s 22-acre site in East Yorkshire, the system is ideal for a full stand-alone build, whilst also suitable for rooftop extensions in tight inner city locations.

The primary benefit of this product is a reduced programme; the product is manufactured on a flow line and therefore removes any impact the weather may have on delivery.   Rooms can be manufactured at a rate of 25 per week, with minimal onsite time. This speed of construction not only reduces labour rates and prelims but gives a much faster return on investment whether clients are selling or gaining a monthly rental income.

 

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Speed of manufacture does not mean compromise in other areas though; modules are constructed to exacting levels in a quality controlled factory environment and with as much as 75% of the buildings manufactured off-site, the risk of accidents on site is greatly reduced. Impact on the local environment is also reduced, with reduced deliveries to site and most of the fit-out happening at Premier Modular’s factory.

Premier Modular, working as a supply chain partner to Sir Robert McAlpine completed a 5 storey 206 bedroom student accommodation block in Sept 2015. Located in Newcastle Upon Tyne city centre it consisted of a mixture of 54 studio flats, 105 en-suite bedrooms and 2 accessible en-suite rooms with associated living spaces, kitchens and study areas.

Premier was chosen as the preferred supplier due to speed of programme and the high quality finish that could be provided. The project was driven by an immovable programme requirement of the September student intake, Premier efficiently manufactured 300 modules fully fitted out and decorated in the factory – an excellent demonstration of the enormous time benefits realised by using the off-site system.

Significantly the foundations and demolition commenced on site whilst the modules were being manufactured – ensuring no time was wasted in the process.

Dan Allison, Divisional Director – Sales Division at Premier Modular said ‘Completing this project using off-site construction not only gave the investors a whole year of additional return, it was also a deciding factor in ‘The Foundry’ in Newcastle winning ‘Project of the Year Up to £10m’ at the Construction News Awards. The client is at the centre of everything we do and we take great pride in pushing the limits of modular design whilst balancing other key project drivers’.

In a market where an increased rate of build is required, building standards are increasing, sustainability is of upmost importance and high quality lifestyle choices are an expectation – Premier Modular’s off-site construction has the answer.

www.premiermodular.co.uk

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The Complexity of Facades & the Risks Involved

In the last 10-15 years the building industry has gone through a multitude of changes which have impacted the role of facades and its growth in the construction industry

Some of these influences are driven by:

  • Advances in manufacturing and material technology
  • Pressure to reduce project duration by using different construction methods
  • Environmental concerns
  • Aesthetics

No longer consisting of simple building elements, modern facades utilise new materials in increasingly complex systems and these are being assembled in untested combinations with other modern methods of construction (MMC) as well as traditional wall types. Untested unique and bespoke building interface arrangements have an increased risk of one or more of their performance parameters failing.

Modern Methods of Construction: Risks

  • More components
  • More interfaces
  • Less historic data / testing / familiarity
  • More complexity of design and geometry

Unravelling the complexities of modern facades and ensuring that the facade is considered holistically rather than elementally has become a specialism, and facade consultants are now often required on many projects. The role of the Facade Consultant is to ensure that both the aesthetic and performance requirements of the façade are met during the design and installation stages. It is important that a facade consultant with the appropriate level of expertise and diversity of experience for the project is selected.

Finding a specialist contractor that can complete all elements of a facade is difficult, and in some cases impossible. As a consequence building envelopes are frequently divided up in to smaller packages. However, there comes a point when having too many specialist contractors becomes detrimental. Using a rainscreen wall as an example, we frequently see these packages being broken up into layers of, rainscreen and insulation, cement particle board, structural framing system (SFS), vapour control layer and plasterboard etc. with each layer being installed by different specialist contractors. This creates a multitude of conflicts and split design responsibilities within the ‘standard’ through wall element alone. Subsequently, these issues are multiplied several fold as soon as this construction hits an interface.

 

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The short term savings generated by the splitting up of facade packages can quickly be eroded by extra management costs, site delays, additional costs from missed interface elements, etc. The risk of longer term (legacy) failures is rarely factored in when savings are tabled during the pre-construction phase; the ‘cost to remediate’ for legacy issues are many times more expensive than the original installation costs.

There are many reasons a facade can fail, all of which are avoidable, but to have any chance of mitigating failures the way that the specialist contractor packages are divided up needs to be carefully considered and it must be done giving due consideration to the capabilities of the specialist contractors that have been selected for tender.

Modern buildings are required to have reduced air permeability, greater u-values and better waterproofing. To do this they rely heavily on gaskets, sealants, tapes and membranes. At junctions and interfaces it is critically important that these elements are detailed and installed correctly, and that the different specialist contractors co-ordinate their works.

When properly managed and designed, modern methods of construction can offer economic, rapid and robust solutions that were unobtainable with traditional methods.

With such a high percentage of building failures being attributed to their facades during a building’s lifetime we have provided a few key tips to help avoid failure from the outset. Some may seem obvious but are also imperative when deciding on the different elements and installation of the facade.

  • Keep the number of specialist contractors to a minimum.
  • Ensure contracts provide clarity on design responsibilities and scope, with particular emphasis on interfaces.
  • When considering savings that may be offered/proposed at the pre-construction stage, question whether these savings have the potential to generate costs in the longer term (risk assessment).
  • Diarise regular design team meetings with all specialist facade contractors present.
  • Engage suitably experienced facade package managers and facade consultants.
  • Test unusual / untried interface details off site.
  • Agree robust QA procedures prior to starting on site.
  • Construct quality and installation reference benchmark areas on site that include examples of both the standard and non-standard details/arrangements.
  • Site test 5% of all interface waterproofing details.

 

www.premierguarantee.com

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JCB & Sika lead the way as new exhibitors complement show regulars

According to show director, Steven Callaghan, every good B2B exhibition needs a blend of elements to ensure success – is this the secret as to why The Offsite Construction Show will open its doors at ExCeL, London, on the 20th and 21st of November, 2019, for the fifth consecutive year?

 

Visitors to shows are increasingly demanding in these days of wall to wall information, available at the touch of a button, 24 hours a day, says Steven, “and visiting a show is a big investment of peoples time. To justify this commitment and to get them to repeat it year on year, we have to put together an event that they feel unable to miss out on, where not attending could leave them at a serious professional disadvantage.”

At the core of a trade show are its exhibitors, Steven continues. “A successful show needs to combine a spine of major, established industry suppliers with a sprinkling of new names and, ideally, with both exhibiting some new products – the major reason that all show visitors give for visiting is to see what’s new. The Offsite Construction Show 2019 (OSCS2019) scores heavily in both of these areas.”

Industry and show stalwarts such as Caledonian Modular, Howick, Modular Building Automation, Euroclad, Frameclad SFS, Lindapter, Marley Plumbing & Drainage and Trimble Tekla, along with many show regulars, are joined at the show by legendary construction industry names such as JCB and Sika, both exhibiting at OSCS for the first time. Other companies showing for the first time include Green Life Buildings, Investment Brix, Johnson Tiles, Merlyn, Boomer Industries, Norcros Adhesives and Vado.

“More than a quarter of the show’s total exhibitors are showing for the first time”, says Head of Sales, Maddie Maclellan, with new product offerings being at the heart of the show”.

Maddie continues, “JCB are known throughout the construction industry worldwide but, until now, they are not associated with the Offsite industry, something they intend to change by exhibiting their new telescopic telehandler, the Hydraload 555-210R, at the show.”

JCB’s Senior Product Specialist, Matthew Cockerill said, ”This new telescopic telehandler has been designed with offsite construction in mind, as the company has observed that a greater use of off-site pre-fabrication calls for heavier lift capacities and increased on-site versatility.”

Exhibitor MBA (Modular Building Automation) have been ever present at the show since its inception in 2015 and will be unveiling their brand new steel frame assembly machine at this year’s event. Managing Director, Martin Smith, says that OSCS2019 was the obvious choice for bringing a new offsite construction product to market.

“The Offsite Construction Show has always been a good show for us, so it was clearly the right show for this important launch. The show spans both steel and timber sectors and, historically, attracts a wide audience with a good number of overseas visitors. This is important for us as we offer our equipment worldwide through our network of dealers.”

Education is another important part of the show blend, continues Steven Callaghan.

“OSCS is second to none when it comes to educational features. The seminar program, put together by our associates, buildoffsite, has become well known for its quality, with most sessions being standing room only every year. The show also features build offsite masterclasses and a second CPD Seminar Theatre, with presentations covering a wide range of offsite construction topics.”

 

 

Another important part of the blend is the show location and this is another area that OSCS leads the way, according to Maddie Maclellan.

“ExCeL London is the only venue that is located in one of the World’s leading cities that offers fast, easy access for all attendees via the DLR (Docklands Light Railway). Over 95% of our visitors arrive at the show in this way, and we believe it is a key factor not only in the size of our attendance, but also how long visitors remain at the show – a very high proportion of our visitors are still on stands and in the aisles at closing time”, adds Maddie.

The final part of the blend is networking, the ability to interface with ones peers and catch up with the latest news from colleagues old and new and this is an area where OSCS will be innovating in 2019 according to Steven Callaghan.

“Our new Offsite Direct Connect system allows all attendees that register on the system to contact with and be contacted by other attendees to prearrange meetings in special Direct Connect zones throughout the show. It is also possible to arrange meetings on-stand or in another show area such as the Networking Cafe. The software drives the whole process, making it very simple to ensure that you definitely meet up with the people that are on your important list”.

“The 2018 show was attended by 4,000 industry specialists and we look forward to seeing them all again, along with some OSCS first timers coming along to see what all the fuss is about”, concludes Steven Callaghan.

To register for your free show entrance ticket or to check out the details of exhibitors, seminars and masterclasses, please go to the show website.

www.offsiteconstructionshow.co.uk

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Engineered Framing & Modular Solutions

For the Urban Built Environment

Our volumetric  and panel systems, constructed in light-gauge cold-formed steel, are designed for use on both residential and commercial projects including rooftop airspace developments.  Whether you are a contractor looking for a structural modular frame only or a property investor requiring a full turnkey service, we can tailor our services to your individual needs. .

 

Part of the Nexus family – we carry out all of the structural engineering design for Nexus projects, but also offer a standalone fully 3D design and detailing service for external clients. Work is carried out in a collaborative environment (BIM) and then details are prepared for direct insertion into the rolling mill (Howick, or similar).

 

A fully flexible solution for temporary and/or permanent accommodation, where speedy installation is paramount. Whether the need is for one person studios, or larger units for multiple occupancy, our designers will work to match that requirement. The single person pods can be stacked and joined to provide the required layout. We combine sustainable technology such as solar panels and battery storage into all our designs, with the aim of creating fully off-grid accommodation at a zero net carbon rating. Easily transported and erected on site, each pod arrives on site ready to “plug and play”. They can also be relocated with ease at a later date, if so required.

 

nexusmodular.co.uk   

 

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