Browsing by Author "Silva, Ana"

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    Causal Effects between Criteria That Establish the End of Service Life of Buildings and Components
    (2022) Silva, Ana; de Brito, Jorge; Thomsen, Andre; Straub, Ad; Prieto, Andres J.; Lacasse, Michael A. A.
    In the last decades, considerable work has been done regarding service life prediction of buildings and building components. Academics and members of the CIB W080 commission, as well as of ISO TC 59/SC14, have made several efforts in this area and created a general terminology for the concept of service life, which is extremely relevant for property management, life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costs (LCC) analyses. Various definitions can be found in the literature that share common ideas. In fact, there are different criteria that trigger the end of a building's service life, but the trap that building practitioners too often fall into and that should be avoided is dividing a problem into separate boxes, labels, and specializations without the mutual cohesion and interaction, and ignoring human behavior. Some definitions of service life are discussed in this review paper, in which the cause-effect processes underlying aging and decay are described. These descriptions highlight the continuous interrelation between different criteria for the end of a building's service life, considering too often neglected and misunderstood causes of the end of life.
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    Estimating Functional and Physical Service Life of Timber Buildings Concerning Thermal Performance Simulations
    (MDPI, 2022) Prieto, Andres J.; Silva, Ana; Tori, Felipe; Carpio, Manuel
    Currently, the cities in southern region of Chile present extremely high levels of atmospheric pollution. One of the main reasons for that is the adoption of inadequate thermal envelopes, which are not adapted to the buildings' climatic and environmental surrounding conditions. Usually, the existing buildings do not have any type of thermal insulation, which causes excessive heating of spaces, in a region where the main source of heat is firewood. Thus, there is a need to intervene, improving the thermal energy performance of timber buildings, but will it be possible to make technically informed decisions that consider buildings' service life? In this study, 72 buildings in the cities of Valdivia and Niebla (South Chile) have been analysed based on in-situ visual inspections. Concerning the novelty of the study, two methodologies have been used to define the end of their physical and functional service life, establishing a hierarchical scale concerning the priority of intervention in timber buildings. After that, three different thermal energy insulation performance scenarios have been modelled in terms of evaluating current conditions, basic thermal rehabilitation, or deep thermal rehabilitation. A more effective and profound intervention in terms of thermal performance leads to better habitability conditions for the buildings' occupants in the context of South Chile, increasing their comfort between 36% to 46% of the year, when compared with current conditions. This kind of innovative analyses are extremely significant for the implementation of preventive maintenance programs focused not only on the restoration of the physical or functional service life of building stocks, but also considering their thermal energy performance in order to improve the habitability of the buildings for their occupants, and reducing both atmospheric pollutants and firewood consumption in the South of the country.
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    Predator traits determine food-web architecture across ecosystems
    (2019) Brose, Ulrich; Archambault, Phillippe ; Barnes, Andrew D.; Bersier, Louis Felix; Boy, Thomas; Canning Clode, João; Conti, Erminia; Días, Marta; Digel, Christoph; Dissanayake, Awantha; Flores, Augusto A. V.; Fussmann, Katarina; Gauzens, Benoit ; Gray, Clare; Häussler, Johanna; Hirt, Myriam R.; Jacob, Ute; Jochum, Malte; Kéfi, Sonia; McLaughlin, Orla; MacPherson, Muriel M.; Latz, Ellen; Layer Dobra, Katrin; Legagneux, Pierre; Li, Yuanheng; Madeira, Carolina; Martínez, Neo D.; Mendonça, Vanessa; Mulder, Christian; Navarrete Campos, Sergio Andrés; O’Gorman, Eoin J.; Ott, David; Paula, José; Perkins, Daniel; Piechnik, Denise; Pokrovsky, Ivan; Raffaelli, David; Rall, Björn C.; Rosenbaum, Benjamin; Ryser, Remo; Silva, Ana; Sohlström, Esra H.; Sokolova, Natalia; Thompson, Murray S. A.; Thompson, Ross M.; Vermandele, Fanny; Vinagre, Catarina; Wang, Shaopeng; Wefer, Jori M.; Williams, Richard J.; Wieters, Evie; Woodward, Guy; Iles , Alison C.