Criteria to Evaluate Innovation Alternatives

Project Criteria

Cost
Long-term facility performance
Construction performance
Duration (design, planning & construction)
Technical feasibility
Worker safety
Environmental impacts
Risk of failure
Implementation complexity

Company Criteria

Reputation impacts
Unique capability
New market
Compatibility with & utilisation of existing capabilities
Improvement of existing capabilities
Appropriateness of benefits
Effective use of Innovation
Size of initial commitment

Crossrail

The industry has been learning from Crossrail in areas such as

Logistics
Traffic management
Underground conditions
Labour requirements
How to deal with local communities
Health & safety.

Office of National Statistics Survey

Only £33 million is spent on R&D every year, less than 0.2% of it's turnover.
Agriculture industry spends £127 million, 12% of it's far smaller turnover.
Two-thirds of the 459 respondents believe sustainability, specifically energy efficiency and carbon reduction require the most attention for innovation.
70% suggested manufacturers are producing the most innovations.
Most people said their firms only spend £10,000 a year on R&D and it should be more.
CIOB suggests a web-based for developing and sharing ideas would be helpful.
Companies are failing to apply for Government Grants which could help them innovate.
More than 80% of construction firms were unaware of the grants available to support innovation.
Only 4.1% of firms had applied for grants.

Drivers for Innovation

Cost efficiency - 42%
Time constraints - 24.8%
Sustainability - 18.1%
Client demands - 15.9%
Technology - 9.8%
Global competition - 3.5%
End users - 2.2%

Top 5 Areas Where Innovation Should be Focused

- Carbon Reduction
- Sustainable Energy/Energy Efficiency
- Improved off-site fabrication
- Training
- Robotics

Arups Skyscraper of the Future

Technologies incorporated include:

Modular building components that can be upgraded and rearranged over time.
Algae facades that produce biofuel.
Solar PV paint
Building systems fully integrated with smart grid and urban resource streams.
Continuous robotic assembly and maintenance of building systems.
Urban food production modules containing meat, fish and vegetable farms.
Building membrane which converts carbon dioxide into oxygen.
Recycling centre which automatically segregates and packages from waste feed.

Harvesting Algae

Growing algae in building facades.
Can be harvested and used for biofuel and shading.
Prototype building in Hamburg uses a facade where algae grows between a sandwich of glass, called 'bioreactors'.
Nutrient rich water inside the glass is fed with C02 which with sunlight allows algae to grow rapidly.
When enough has grown, the algae is separated and 'harvested' to an external biogas plant which converts it into fuel that the building can use.
The panels also shade the building and capture solar heat to generate hot water.

Integrated Photovoltaics

The next generations of PVs will be integrated into building materials.
Thin film solar panels are already being installed.
Oxford Photovoltatics is integrating solar cells into glazing panels to produce what looks like 'tinted glass'.
They have received £2 million in funding to take it from concept to intermediate scale.
It could provide 20% of a building's energy.

Humble Concrete

Surfaces that act as giant air filters to combat pollution and materials that can heal themselves.

Self-Healing Concrete

Contains limestone-producing bacteria which are activated by rainwater.
Could potentially increase the service life of the concrete and provide cost savings as a result.
Main problem is scaling up the technology as the healing agent that is required is expensive.

Smart Systems

The use of sensors which would monitor and control a building's behaviour to minimise carbon emissions.
Costs of achieving the reductions are more than people are willing to pay.
Industry needs to look at how costs can be driven down whilst increasing performance.
The recession and current economic environment puts pressure on companies to innovate and come up with new ways of doing things.

Robotics

Robots that can lay bricks and create highly intricate patterns to form the facade of a winery in Switzerland.

Flight Assembled Architecture

Use of flying quadrocopters - a remote controlled flying device with an electric motor and four propellers.
Could be used for functions such as motion capture, aerial photography and site mapping.
Believe they could be used to build complex cylindrical towers which could stand more than 600m high & house 30,000 occupants.
Will require the development of high-performance lightweight materials as current materials are too heavy.
Are perfectly suited for tensile structures where they could easily loop ropes, cables or wires around a structure.
Tensile construction offers optimum utilisation of their unique set of characteristics & constraints.
Envisaged that drones could work in areas unfit for humans or help in disaster relief & other emergencies.
Bouygues are trialling robots for tasks such as wall-drilling, roughening and sanding.

Printing Components

Prefabricated concrete components.
Case Study - Mott MacDonald's and Laing O'Rourke's £35 million Royal Victoria Building.
Building required a quarter fewer workers and delivered 20 weeks faster than using traditional techniques.
55% of the building was made offsite & delivered 'just-in-time'.

3D Printing

Only recently used in construction.
Foster + Partners planning to printing a space station for the moon using lunar rock.
3D printing involves the successive laying down of layers of material.
3D printing is unlikely to suit large sized components as the equipment would be too expensive.

Near Site Manufacture

Skanska developed flying factories which use offsite factories that can be moved from site to site.
The technique could deliver the benefits of offsite whilst overcoming the traditional barriers of capital investment & high transport costs.
Clients could benefits from a 28% reduction in cost per m2 and 30% shorter build times.

	Created by d.moran-10 almost 10 years ago

Undergraduate Advanced Construction Note on Innovation, created by d.moran-10 on 22/05/2014.

Innovation