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Building Materials
Published in P.K. Jayasree, K Balan, V Rani, Practical Civil Engineering, 2021
P.K. Jayasree, K Balan, V Rani
Physiological requirements of wood destroying and wood inhabiting fungi: A favorable temperature: The temperature must be 25°C–30°C for optimum growth.An adequate supply of oxygen: Oxygen is essential for the growth of fungi.Moisture: Generally wood will not be attacked by the common fungi at moisture contents below the fiber saturation point (FSP).Nutrients: Wood has carbon content. That means, wood is a very suitable nutrient for fungi. Because fungi derive their energy from oxidation of organic compounds. Decay fungi wood rotters can use polysaccharides while stain fungi evidently require simple forms such as soluble carbohydrates, proteins, and other substances present in the parenchyma cell of sapwood. Additionally, the presence of nitrogen in wood is necessary for the growth of fungi.Insects: Termites, carpenter ants, and marine borers. Termites: Subterranean termites damage wood that is untreated, moist, in direct contact with standing water, soil, and other sources of moisture.Dry wood termites attack and inhabit wood that has been dried to moisture contents as low as 5%–10%.Carpenter ants: Carpenter ants do not feed on wood.They attack most often wood in ground contact or wood that is intermittently wetted.Carpenter bees: They cause damage to unpainted wood.Marine borers: They rapidly destroy wood in salt water and brackish water.
Effects of safety leadership and safety management practices on safety participation through a casual-chain mediators approach in the Chinese construction industry
Published in International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 2022
Eight hundred questionnaires were distributed. This study collected 595 responses in total. Out of the 595 responses, 26 were discarded due to either incomplete data or insufficient effort in responding [45]. The remaining 569 responses are deemed fit for analysis. From a sample of 569 respondents, 563 are males (98.95%), and most of them belong to an age group of 31–40 years (49.6%). In addition, the respondents with working experience of 0–4 years (53.4%) account for the most significant percentage, followed by 4–6 years of working experience (29.7%). However, only 96 respondents (16.9%) have working experience of more than 6 years. Furthermore, approximately 41.3% of the respondents are married. Based on Han et al. [4], the Chinese construction workers’ trades are usually divided into steel, plumbing, electrical, concrete, scaffolding and carpenter. Hereby, this study follows the same divisions of construction workers’ trades. The detailed characteristics of the study’s respondents are presented in Table 1.
Analysing the underlying factors affecting safety performance in building construction
Published in Production Planning & Control, 2020
Jeffrey Boon Hui Yap, Wen Kai Lee
Building construction-related personnel and operatives involving middle managers (i.e. project manager, architect, engineer and quantity surveyor), technicians (i.e. electrician, plumber, and carpenter) and general workers are chosen as the unit of analysis as they are key actors in building production at construction sites. In addition, the reason for the combination of actors from different backgrounds was to attain a balanced view of the research topic. The questionnaire is then piloted with 30 targeted respondents to ensure clarity, comprehensibility and unambiguity of the content (Yap and Lock 2017). The internal consistency of the pilot survey instrument is ascertained with Cronbach’s coefficient alphavalue of 0.825 which is greater than the needed value of 0.70 (Hair et al. 2010).
Refiguring global construction challenges through ethnography
Published in Construction Management and Economics, 2019
Grosse manages a construction company, building the brickwork and concrete structures of buildings, and is a carpenter and a civil and industrial engineer by training. He refers to Thiel (2010), who used his experience as a construction worker to study the environment with which he was familiar, but argues that there has not been any autoethnographic research undertaken by an active construction manager. Grosse analyses moments when the practitioner insider’s view makes it difficult to maintain an ethnographic distance, but also the benefits for management insights, articulating his autoethnography as a status in which “I am always the construction professional but cannot stop being the researcher”. He discusses how reflexivity cannot operate without background knowledge, referring to economic, technical, physiological and emotional circumstances, and explaining, “I knew very well why I made such an expensive offer, as I know what it means to wheelbarrow some cubic meters of concrete into a courtyard, shovelling it into buckets, lifting it up and so on. I know what it costs, and I know what it means for workers’ arms and backs” (the emphasis here is ours).