SCALE OF BUILDING RESEARCH IN BRITAIN
is now benefiting to the extent of about £150,000 a year for the ag- gregate which is now being used in the building and civil engineering industry.
TESTS OF PERFORATED
BRICK
Another new material, or rather new form of an old material, de- veloped by the Building Research Station. is the vertically perforated brick which, while providing ade- quate resistance to rain penetration. gives added thermal insulation and a more rapid rate of building than a cavity wall of normal bricks.
A development of this sort il- lustrates the wide range of problems which have to be tackled before such a newly developed product can be
vigorously exploited. Apart from such obvious questions as the study of suitable clays for extrusion and the investigation of many al- ternative designs of perforation, from the point of view of ease and accuracy of manufacture. it has been necessary to measure the
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thermal insulation of a wall built in the new bricks, to study its rain penetration characteristics, and to make experimental trials of the rate of laying as compared with ordinary bricks.
Currently a further stage has been reached in the investigation of the
use
of such bricks in practical building situations: the evidence. so far available. suggests that a wall built with the new brick takes about three-quarters of the time to construct as compared with a wall of brick cavity clinker block. Two firms in Britain are now manufac- turing this type of brick.
STRUCTURAL ASPECTS
On the structural side of building. the Research Station has for a long time been concerned with and, in- deed, pioneered the study of “com- posite action." as for instance. of a frame and its infilling: first, with the experimental and theoretical study of the problem and. later, with the production of simplified rules for designers which incor- porate the findings of research.
A simple peg model used at Britain's Building Research Station at Garston, Hertfordshire, England, for the study of the layout of buildings. and underground services in sloping sites.
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It is, in fact, a recurrent problem of research that a good deal of ef fort is often necessary after the basic theoretical understanding has been achieved, to translate results into a set of rules which a busy de- signer nan use with assurance in practice.
In this case, the work has led to useful economies in design. As an example. five particular cases showed a saving of £35,000 in structural costs by the use of the newer methods. and one consultant reckons that, by using this design basis whenever possible. has led to savings of about one per cent. of the total cost of the building work to which they had been applied.
In foundations, too. the Station's work on short bored piles. both in their design and the development of machines for boring them, is saving around £30 a house on several thousand houses built annually on shrinkable clays. In addition, the methods eliminate expensive re- medial measures which would otherwise often have been neces-
sary.
THE PHYSICS OF BUILDINGS
Heating, lighting and noise are obvious fields of research which link closely with the reactions of the users of the building and, in all these fields. the Station is very active. To take but one aspect, namely, noise, the work has here been concerned both with the physics of sound insulation and with. the reactions of the inhabitants to noise; indeed, the standards recom- mended for dwellings, for instance, are based on surveys of user reac. tion.
The work has also included studies of the noise of plant on building sites and of possible ways of reducing it to minimise the risk of complaints from the occupants of adjoining buildings.
Currently, in collaboration with the London County Council. a study of noise round the clock is being
THE HONG KONG & FAR EAST BUILDER-VOLUME 18. NUMBER 2