world’s first ArtScience Museum

most expensive casino in the world located in Sinapore will soon open the world’s first ArtScience Museum. The concept of the “Welcoming Hand of Singapore” features 10 “fingers” of the museum anchored by a unique round base in the middle of the composition. Each finger reveals a different gallery. At the “fingertips” openings were created that illuminate the dramatically curved interior walls. The museum’s dish-like roof channels rainwater through the central atrium of the building creating a 35-meter water drop into a small pool. The rainwater is then recycled for use in the building’s restrooms. The author of the design is the world-renowned architect Moshie Safadie. The ArtScience Museum features 21 gallery spaces totaling 6,000 square meters that will deliver exhibits from art and science, media and technology to design and architecture.

A Spanish night club... the real astheticity of architect

A new project of a Spanish interior designer Elia Felices is called La Cova Night Club built in the city of Mataro near-by Barcelona. This night club has a surface of 500 square meters that house a cloak-room, box office, dance parquet, two bars, DJ board and of course a space for visitors. All rooms are part of one-storey rectangular room that allows to distribute clients in rational and intensive way. The main idea was to create a space reminding an ice-cavern in the middle of a city. Everything has the style of an ice-cavern; decorations, lighting, shapes, colours etc. Two big lamps are hanging from the ceiling as two icicles for example. Other source of light are lamps shaped as stones emerging from the floor. The designer wanted to accentuate the simple design with a very variable lighting. Colour lighting from a number of reflectors is a distinctive element of La Cova. The main entrance is lightened by a half-moon to gain attention of passing-bys. White box-offices are decorated with blue flower wall paintings.The dance parquet is literally bordered by two bars backlit by LED RGB lights that change colour.

revit architecture tutorials for beginners

here is some of the video tutorials for revit architecture and some useful links also included in below..  you can download revit architecture directly from the link....
revit architecture coming from autodesk... its exclusively designed for the designers of builders ,i mean architects and structural engineers...

http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=download_center



flash tutorials


placing walls and doors
placing coloumns
customizing content
sectional views
elevational views
perspective views
creating building site


some other sites providing the video tutorials of revit architecture
for user interface
modifying tools required
modelling
views and directions
modelling continuity
video tutorials

Workability is the ability of a fresh concrete mix to fill the mold properly with the desired work (vibration) and without reducing the concrete's quality. Workability depends on water content, aggregate (shape and size distribution), cementitious content and age, and can be modified by adding chemical admixtures, like super-plasticizer. Raising the water content or adding chemical admixtures will increase concrete workability. Excessive water will lead to increased bleeding (surface water) and segregation of aggregates (when the cement and aggregates start to separate), with the resulting concrete having reduced quality. The use of an aggregate with an undesirable gradation can result in a very harsh mix design with a very low slump, which cannot be readily made more workable by addition of reasonable amounts of water.

Slump Test

The slump test is the most well-known and widely used test method to characterize the workability of fresh concrete. The inexpensive test, which measures consistency, is used on job sites to determine rapidly whether a concrete batch should be accepted or rejected.

The apparatus consists of a mold in the shape of a frustum of a cone with a base diameter of 8 inches, a top diameter of 4 inches, and a height of 12 inches. The mold is filled with concrete in three layers of equal volume. Each layer is compacted with 25 strokes of a tamping rod. The slump cone mold is lifted vertically upward and the change in height of the concrete is measured. Four types of slumps are commonly encountered. The only type of slump is frequently referred to as the “true” slump, where the concrete remains intact and retains a symmetric shape. A zero slump and a collapsed slump are both outside the range of workability that can be measured with the slump test. If part of the concrete shears from the mass, the test must be repeated with a different sample of concrete. A concrete that exhibits a shear slump in a second test is not sufficiently cohesive and should be rejected.

Water cement ratio

Water-cement ratio is the ratio of weight of water to the weight of cement used in a concrete mix. It has an important influence on the quality of concrete produced. A lower water-cement ratio leads to higher strength and durability, but may make the mix more difficult to place. Placement difficulties can be resolved by using plasticizer. The water-cement ratio is independent of the total cement content (and the total water content) of a concrete mix.

Often, the water to cement ratio is characterized as the water to cement plus pozzolan ratio, w/(c + p). The pozzolan is typically a fly ash, or blast furnace slag. It can include a number of other materials, such as silica fume, rice hull ash or natural pozzolans. The addition of pozzolans will influence the strength gain of the concrete.

Reinforced concrete

Reinforced concrete is concrete in which reinforcement bars, reinforcement grids, plates or fibers have been incorporated to strengthen the concrete in tension. The term Ferro Concrete refers only to concrete that is reinforced with iron or steel. Other materials used to reinforce concrete can be organic and inorganic fibres as well as composites in different forms. Concrete is strong in compression, but weak in tension, thus adding reinforcement increases the strength in tension. In addition, the failure strain of concrete in tension is so low that the reinforcement has to hold the cracked sections together.

Concrete blocks

A concrete block is primarily used as a building material in the construction of walls. It is sometimes called a concrete masonry unit (CMU). A concrete block is one of several precast concrete products used in construction. The term precast refers to the fact that the blocks are formed and hardened before they are brought to the job site.

The concrete commonly used to make concrete blocks is a mixture of powdered Portland cement, water, sand, and gravel. The concrete mixture used for blocks has a higher percentage of sand and a lower percentage of gravel and water than the concrete mixtures used for general construction purposes.

Ready mixed concretes in construction

Ready mixed concrete:

If instead of being batched and mixed on site, concrete is delivered for placing from a central plant. It is referred to as ready-mixed or pre-mixed concrete. This type of concrete is used extensively abroad as it offers numerous advantages in comparison with other methods of manufacture:

1.                  Close quality control of batching which reduces the variability of the desired properties of hardened concrete.

2.                  Use on congested sites or in highway construction where there is little space for a mixing plant and aggregate stockpiles;

3.                  Use of agitator trucks to ensure care in transportation, thus prevention segregation and maintaining workability

4.                  Convenience when a small quantity of concrete or intermittent placing is required.

There are two categories of ready-mixed concrete: central-mixed and transit mixed or truck mixed. In the first category, mixing is done in a central plant and then concrete is transported in an agitator truck. In the second category, the materials are batched at a central plant but are mixed in a truck.

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rmc indialink to rmc india

Processing defects of timber

Processing Defects

Planed lumber can have defects created during processing and sawmilling. These include:

Processor Marks A tree is stripped of branches by a processor. If the hydraulic rolls of the processor are improperly aligned, the rolls will leave marks on the log.

Dog Holes Dog holes are large rough holes created by handling the logs by tools known as dogs, tongs, turners, or other such equipment.

Wane Wane arises when a board includes a portion of the tree’s original surface. As a consequence, a corner or edge of the board is rounded rather than squared.

Tearing of Face Tearing of face consists of parts of the wood being torn out during rough-sawing below the line of cut. When planed, this shows as pock marks or small indentations on the surface of the lumber. This is most common in cedar.

Foreign Objects Foreign objects can become embedded in trees, logs, or lumber and cause damage to the planer. These objects range from stones, nails, and barbed wire to teeth from the sawmill saws

Micro wave and chemical seasoning

Microwave seasoning

Pulsed microwave energy is directed into layers of timber in a manner that will drive the moisture out of the timber at rates that will not cause seasoning degrade. The process has the ability to deliver energy that can be varied from second to second to suit the moisture content of the timber at the time, and the ambient conditions.

In some cases, microwave energy delivery can be combined with low ambient pressure to give optimal seasoning speeds.

Chemical seasoning

Chemical seasoning, which is sometimes used for very high value applications such as rifle butts, golf club heads and carvings, where the timber is required to be completely free of surface checks. The process involves soaking the green timber (as soon as it is cut) in a hydroscopic chemical for about a day, which slows down the rate of moisture loss and minimises the risk of inducing the internal stresses which cause checking to occur during the subsequent air-drying.