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Due to the excellence in mobility and automation, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS, a.k.a. drones) have been widely implemented in detecting building anomalies and assessing construction conditions. Additionally, the AECO industry is expanding significant interest in the preservation of as-built heritage using Building Information Modeling (BIM), generally described as Heritage or Historic BIM (HBIM), which focuses on long-term documentation and real-time monitoring of historical buildings. This research proposes a vision for integrating UAS and HBIM for continuous building-defect monitoring by establishing a decision-making support framework for autonomous drone inspection. Three essential aspects concerning defect monitoring will be presented: a summary of the taxonomy of historical building defects (BDs) for identifying appropriate detecting occasions, the potential to increase the efficiency and adaptability of drone utilization by specifying drone types based on defects and taking dynamic environmental conditions into consideration to predict and prevent latent damages. By reviewing current literature about BDs and drone flight planning, a framework contributing to the automation of drone inspection for precaution and protection of built heritage will be proposed, serving as a contribution to the body of knowledge. As for the contribution to the industry, this research provides a futuristic vision for automatic control of managing real-time BDs and enhances the automated command of UAS and the promotion of digital twin construction for historic buildings through continuous data acquisition and registration., Transforming Construction with Reality Capture Technologies, 2022: The Digital Reality of Tomorrow

Fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composite materials have been used in a variety of civil and infrastructure applications since the early 1980s including in wind turbine blades. The world is now confronting the problem of how to dispose of decommissioned blades in an environmentally sustainable manner. One proposed solution is to repurpose the blades for use in new structures (www.re-wind.info). One promising repurposing application is in pedestrian and cycle bridges. This paper reports on the experimental investigation conducted on a wind blade to be used in the construction of a bridge for a greenway in Cork, Ireland in late 2021. Two LM 13.4 blades originally manufactured by LM Windpower (Kolding, Demark) will be utilized as girders for the bridge. A detailed reverse-engineering investigation of the as-received, previously used, blade was conducted to obtain material and structural properties for use in the structural design of the bridge. The material tests included physical (volume fraction and laminate architecture) and mechanical tests (tension and compression) at multiple locations. Full-scale testing of a section of the blade was performed to determine the load carrying capacity and the failure modes when loaded in flexure similar to that which will be experienced in the bridge. Key details of the testing conducted and the results are provided. The results of the testing revealed that the FRP material is still in excellent condition and that the blade has the strength and stiffness in flexure to serve as a bridge girder for the bridge to be constructed.

Purpose: Foreign body aspiration is difficult to diagnose because many aspirated foreign bodies are low density or radiolucent. Digital radiographs (DR) are poor at detecting radiolucent foreign bodies. Digital tomosynthesis (DTS) has been shown to be ideally suited for applications where DR is insensitive and the increased dose from computed tomography (CT) is not justified. Our objective was to determine if DTS can be a practical alternative to DR and CT in the diagnosis of foreign body aspiration. Approach: A phantom approximating the densities of a pediatric chest was constructed. Radiolucent foreign bodies were placed in the airways. Seven pediatric radiologists assessed DTS and DR images with and without simulated breathing motion. Two rounds were performed with fixed exposure techniques and then automatic exposure control techniques. Interobserver agreement was evaluated using Fleiss’ kappa. Results: DTS and DR images using fixed exposure techniques performed very poorly with accuracies of 42% to 60%. DTS with automatic exposure control techniques increased accuracy to 84% for a stationary phantom, but the accuracy dropped to 70% in a phantom with simulated motion. DTS outperformed DR, with DR accuracies of 60% and 63% for stationary simulations and motion, respectively. Interobserver agreement was poor with Fleiss’ kappa of 0.476. Conclusion: DTS is superior to DR for radiolucent foreign body detection. However, the overall accuracy and interobserver agreement are likely too low for this modality to be clinically useful.

The formation of a national association in the United States to represent all nurse practitioners (NPs) regardless of specialty has been a process of seeking out opportunities and facing challenges. From humble beginnings in the mid-1980s, the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) has grown to nearly 100,000 members representing over 270,000 NPs. AANP provides leadership through grassroots efforts and coalitions at the national, state, and community levels to advance the agenda of NPs, including influencing legislation for payment for NPs from programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, the ability for NPs to prescribe medication-assisted treatments for opioid abuse disorders, and input from practice to the advanced practice nursing Consensus Model. AANP continues to be an agent for reform in the US health system by representing NPs who render high-quality cost-effective care.

This paper discusses the opening moves of an international multidisciplinary research project involving researchers from Ireland, Northern Ireland and the US, aiming to address the global problem of end-of-life disposal of wind turbine blades. The problem is one of enormous scale on several levels: a typical 2.0 MW turbine has three 50m long blades each containing around 20 tonnes of fibre reinforced plastic (FRP). It is estimated that by 2055, 16.3 million tonnes of material from the global wind industry will await disposal. Whilst land-fill is the current means of disposal, the nature of the materials used in the composite construction of wind blades (glass and carbon fibres, resins, foams) means it unsustainable. Hence, the project sets out to deploy innovative design and logistical concepts for reusing and recycling these blades. The project begins within an innovative joint design studio, staged between Queen’s University Belfast and Georgia Institute of Technology, where architecture students will, within the highly-constrained contexts of the blade properties and the potential reuse sites, systematically generate, filter, and prototype a selection of proposals, reusing the decommissioned wind turbine blades in buildings, infrastructure, landscape, and public art. The paper sets out the social and environmental context for the work and discusses the decision-making infrastructure provided by the Centre of GIS and Geomatics at QUB – both in terms of locational data and their potential to organize and facilitate decision making. The paper analyzes the potential and risks of considering this highly constrained and yet multidisciplinary problem within the context of a Masters level Architecture studio. The paper concludes with an analysis of how outcome-driven design problems challenge traditional design studio cultures, acknowledging the need to make processes and ideas more explicit in order to categorise, analyze, rank and refine proposed architectural solutions.