Abstract:
The seminar proposed for this visit is on a relatively new topic, which has piqued my interest over the past 10 or so years, however only since joining PolyU there has been some progress worth sharing. Any observer of industrial practice over time would not fail to note that most manufacturing industry has transformed itself and modern factories have moved away from the labour intensive assembly lines to largely unmanned and automated manufacturing using robots. In a glaring and stubborn exception to this trend the construction industry has barely changed and remains highly dependent on labour. It is not for lack of recognition of this problem that no satisfactory solution has been found, as I recall SERC/EPSRC calls from 3 decades ago asking for proposals on “construction as a manufacturing process.” Traditionally, precast construction and more recently, modular integrated construction (MIC) have been the most notable efforts in this direction, however they have not garnered universal appeal given the severe architectural limitations associated with these approaches. Additive manufacturing (such as 3D printing) offers new possibilities, however the attempts so far have focused on building entire structures on site, which hardly qualifies as automation in the manufacturing sense. This presentation will present a vision of construction automation proposing a somewhat different approach, which could potentially be a viable route to this goal but only after significant research challenges have been addressed. The proposed approach ensures freedom of architectural expression unlike MIC or precast construction.
Bio:
Prof Asif Usmani joined Hong Kong Polytechnic University in August 2016 as Professor and Head of the Department of Building Services Engineering (now Building Environment and Energy Engineering). He was Professor of Structural Engineering and Computational Mechanics at the University of Edinburgh (until Sept 2015). His primary research interest is in fire safety engineering, particularly concerned with understanding the thermo-mechanical behaviour of structures in real fires using computational methods validated with experiments. Key achievements include: providing fresh insights to understand non-intuitive structural behaviour observed in full-scale fire tests on a steel-frame composite building at Cardington (UK) during the mid-1990s; explaining the collapse of WTC Twin Towers; proposing and leading research on a distributed real-time emergency response system, FireGrid, demonstrated successfully in London in 2010 (subject of a BBC Horizon documentary); His current research interests include: Development of computational tools for integrated simulation of structures subjected to fire based on open-source software framework OpenSees; Characterisation of fire loading in large open-plan compartments in the context of performance based engineering for structural fire resistance; progressive collapse simulation of tall building under multiple-floor fires; and developing AI-based tools for smart firefighting building on the work of the FireGrid project in UK. This is currently his main research focus, as he is leading a Hong Kong Research Grants Committee (RGC), Theme-based Research Scheme (TRS) funded HK$33.333 Million project,“SureFire: Smart Urban Resilience and Firefighting”(2020-2024).
Open to all. Attendees external to Imperial need to register by email.
Time: 3:00 pm