New BSI documents published for principal contractors and designers
Following many months of negotiation with industry stakeholders, the UK national standards body, the British Standards Institution has released a new suite of documents relating to competence in the built environment. This is linked to the Building a Safer Future report following the Grenfell Tower disaster. It includes: PAS 8671 framework for the competence of individual principal designers, PAS 8672 framework for the competence of individual principal contractors, and PAS 8673 competence requirements for the management of safety in residential buildings.
The standards support industry reform, in line with the new Building Safety Act and the associated golden thread requirements, and are intended to minimise safety risks and improve protection to consumers and occupants, including residents, in and about buildings. Sponsored by The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, they have been published as part of the government-funded built environment competence programme and have been developed by three steering groups made up of built environment professionals.
Scott Steedman, director-general of standards at BSI, said: “The standards provide an agreed, common approach for industry to embed building safety competence for design, construction and building management at a senior level. This is a major step forward which has the potential to support real change in the industry understanding of building safety in the years and decades ahead.”
To download the documents, visit https://bit.ly/3dduqyr.
The Geospatial Commission has published location data investment guidance to help public sector organisations
The Geospatial Commission has published appraisal guidance to help public sector organisations make more effective cases for investing in location data. With location data seen as a strategic national asset, delivering significant value for people, organisations and wider society, it supports key government priorities such as net zero, levelling up and had an important role in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Public sector investments have previously struggled to understand, assess and articulate the economic, social and environmental value of location data coherently, constraining their ability to unlock funding.
By providing a more structured and practical approach to assessing value that is based on best-practice methods, existing research and the experiences of stakeholders, the Geospatial Commission aims to drive greater consistency in the way that these benefits are routinely captured and improve the quality of investment cases presented to decision makers.
The seven-step framework presented in the guidance sets out an approach to understanding, assessing and articulating the value of a location data project, from the inception stage to the presentation of benefits. Many of the principles set out in this guidance are also relevant for data investments more generally and support commitments to improve the use of digital and data, as set out in the national data strategy and the roadmap to digital and data 2022-2025.
Find it via https:// bit.ly/3ePmK69.
Skanska is trialling new technology
The Ultimate Cell, a hydrogen device developed by UTIS is not much bigger than a can of baked beans and has been developed to increase the efficiency of vehicles and machinery, reducing fuel consumption and gas emissions, and benefitting from hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) fuel (which was mandated by Skanska UK for use across all site plant and equipment in 2021). Powered by the battery or alternator on vehicles and machinery the cell uses an electrolyte to produce a gaseous mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.
Fugro laboratory technician preparing sample for core logging
Fugro develops a unique site investigation solution for Arklow Bank Wind Park
Fugro has completed fieldwork on a geotechnical site investigation for SSE renewables’ Arklow Bank Wind Park phase 2. The offshore wind park will support Ireland’s climate action target of producing 7GW of offshore wind energy by 2030 and is located approximately six to 13km off the coast of Ireland, in an area known for its unpredictable metocean conditions. It uses a unique casing system designed for the offshore site conditions to enable survey work to be completed with minimal downtime. The acquired geo-data will be used to understand the site’s subsurface conditions and support foundation designs and installation.
The geo-data specialist also engineered a full suite of purposely designed conductor casing handling devices to remove manual intervention, improving health and safety of deck crew and ensuring deployment efficiency within the short slack water windows.
Laboratory testing is currently underway, building on the site testing completed in Fugro’s offshore laboratory to inform foundation designs. When complete, the 800 MW wind park will be capable of powering almost 850,000 homes with green energy and offset 830bn kilograms of carbon emissions each year.
Sizewell C approval faces legal challenge
Campaigners initiate judicial review process against decision to approve nuclear new build. The decision to green light construction of Sizewell C could be set for a judicial review after campaigners against the proposed nuclear power station initiated legal action. Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng approved the £20bn scheme in July after a series of delays, despite the planning inspectorate’s warnings about its environmental impact. The application involves the construction of a new nuclear power station producing reliable, low-carbon electricity to help Britain achieve net zero. It is intended that Sizewell C will generate enough low-carbon electricity to supply six million homes.
Balfour Beatty VINCI celebrates historic first tunnelling breakthrough on HS2
HS2 celebrated the very first tunnelling breakthrough on Europe’s largest infrastructure project this summer. A 2,000-tonne tunnel boring machine (TBM) named ‘Dorothy’ – after Dorothy Hodgkin, who in 1964 became the first British woman to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry – has completed its one-mile dig under Long Itchington Wood in Warwickshire. The giant 125m long TBM, which started its journey at the tunnel’s north portal last December, broke through the wall of the reception box at the south portal site on 22 July.
The tunnelling team involved 400 people working around the clock in shifts for seven months to operate the TBM to put 790 concrete rings in place, with each ring made from eight two-metre-long segments. The tunnel preserves the ancient woodland above, which is classified as a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) and has complex ecosystems that have taken hundreds of years to establish.
Creating both bores of the tunnel, the machine is removing around 250,000 cubic metres of mudstone and soil, which is being transported to the on-site slurry treatment plant where the material is separated out before being reused on embankments and landscaping along the route.
ESA testing sensor network for smart city navigation
New infrastructure added to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) research and technology centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands is helping to test how tomorrow’s smart cities will operate in practice using the HANSEL system hosted in ESTEC’s navigation laboratory. It allows sensor linking across the site which is providing insight into the collective networking and computing needed to get a variety of ‘intelligent elements’ to work together – like the brain of a future smart city. Scenes from future smart city living include building light and power switching on and off as occupants move from room to room. Central to these concepts is the need for shared, precise positioning with the HANSEL system looking forward to a time when cities are embedded with sensors that measure their positions and share them with each other.
AUS Army Corp CRREL mechanical engineer assembles a newly engineered automated terrestrial laser scanning system; A-TLSA-TLS. Picture credit: David Marquis.
CRREL researchers test new modular lidar tower sensors
The US Army Engineer Research and Development Centre’s cold regions research and engineering laboratory’s (CRREL) remote sensing geographic information system centre of expertise (RSGIS CX) is testing a newly engineered automated terrestrial laser scanning system known as A-TLS in Alaska. The system will help determine how underground permafrost changes the landscapes above by capturing precise lidar laser scans that can detect any gradual caving or sinking of the surface area as a means of assessing and validating satellite-based assets for continuous monitoring of permafrost environments globally.
A great deal of interest is in district cooling, say FVB Energy
FVB Energy, an engineering and management consulting company specialising in energy, have revealed there is high interest within many energy companies to pursue a new investment or expand their existing investment in district cooling. FVB’s Thomas Nordin has said a contributing factor to the increased interest is that customers are demanding better operational reliability, but another factor is that the EU F-gas regulation, to control emissions from fluorinated greenhouse gases, which has seen refrigerants with a high environmental impact are being phased out.
Hornsea 3 onshore cable works for Ørsted to be delivered by VolkerFitzpatrick and supported by VolkerStevin
Appointed by Ørsted, VolkerFitzpatrick is set to deliver the installation of 240km of onshore cables for the Hornsea 3 offshore wind farm. Subject to Ørsted taking a final investment decision on Hornsea 3, the project will see the onshore cables connect to the offshore wind farm, from the landfall at Weybourne in Norfolk to the Norwich main national grid substation and become the world’s largest offshore wind zone with Hornsea 1 and 2. In total, they would produce enough low-cost, clean, renewable electricity to power more than five million UK homes.
In brief:
- Balfour Beatty has become the first construction company in the UK to roll out automated cone laying machines to reduce the risks associated with cone laying activities across its highway’s operations.
- By early 2023, the BMW Group will have a digital scan of every one of its vehicle plants worldwide. It will merge the real and virtual worlds and tap into the potential for efficient planning of future plant structures and production facilities.
- The European Space Agency is aiming to bring sci- fi-inspired extended reality to space through the development of virtual and augmented reality applications with seven new projects boosting human-machine interfaces.
- Fugro’s heavy rain flood assessment geo-data is being used by the City of Bad Homburg in Germany to develop flood hazard maps for the region and inform residents of potential risks.
- The Office for National Statistics has reported a June drop of 1.4% in output as construction feels the impact of record price rises. In July the annual rate of all construction work price growth hit a record high since the construction output price indices series began in January 2014.
- Survey Solutions has appointed David Lowe as their new managing director.
- Supply chain insolvencies could rival inflation as a threat to project delivery, according to Turner & Townsend, whose recent UK market intelligence report, found that insolvencies had risen 72.1% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2022, with small and medium-sized enterprises at the greatest risk of failure.
- VolkerFitzpatrick has recently completed £8.5m of major upgrades to runways at Gloucestershire Airport, the busiest general aviation airport in the UK. It includes below-ground infrastructure in readiness for a new radar system.
- Wavin’s territory director for the UK and Ireland, Mike Ward, has implored built environment, designers, water management companies, utility providers, and public bodies to work together to develop integrated innovative infrastructure, and more comprehensive water management solutions to combat the impacts of extreme weather patterns.