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A Brief Guide to Mold, Moisture & Your Home

 

Mold Basics

  • The key to mold control is moisture control.
  • If mold is a problem in your home, you should clean up the mold promptly and fix the water problem.
  • It is important to dry water-damaged areas and items within 24-48 hours to prevent mold growth.

Why is mold growing in my home

 

Mold growing outdoors on firewood. Molds come in many colors; both white and black molds are shown here.

Molds are part of the natural environment. Outdoors, molds play a part in nature by breaking down dead organic matter such as fallen leaves and dead trees, but indoors, mold growth should be avoided. Molds reproduce by means of tiny spores; the spores are invisible to the naked eye and float through outdoor and indoor air. Mold may begin growing indoors when mold spores land on surfaces that are wet. There are many types of mold, and none of them will grow without water or moisture.


Can mold cause health problems?

Molds are usually not a problem indoors, unless mold spores land on a wet or damp spot and begin growing. Molds have the potential to cause health problems. Molds produce allergens (substances that can cause allergic reactions), irritants, and in some cases, potentially toxic substances (mycotoxins). Inhaling or touching mold or mold spores may cause allergic reactions in sensitive individuals. Allergic responses include hay fever-type symptoms, such as sneezing, runny nose, red eyes, and skin rash (dermatitis).

Allergic reactions to mold are common. They can be immediate or delayed. Molds can also cause asthma attacks in people with asthma who are allergic to mold. In addition, mold exposure can irritate the eyes, skin, nose, throat, and lungs of both mold-allergic and non-allergic people. Symptoms other than the allergic and irritant types are not commonly reported as a result of inhaling mold. Research on mold and health effects is ongoing.

This [guidance] provides a brief overview; it does not describe all potential health effects related to mold exposure. For more detailed information consult a health professional. You may also wish to consult your state or local health department.

How do I get rid of mold?

Magnified mold spores

Molds gradually destroy the things they grow on. You can prevent damage to your home and furnishings, save money, and avoid potential health problems by controlling moisture and eliminating mold growth

It is impossible to get rid of all mold and mold spores indoors; some mold spores will be found floating through the air and in house dust. The mold spores will not grow if moisture is not present. Indoor mold growth can and should be prevented or controlled by controlling moisture indoors. If there is mold growth in your home, you must clean up the mold and fix the water problem. If you clean up the mold, but don’t fix the water problem, then, most likely, the mold problem will come back.

Please visit EPA for Introduction to Indoor Air Quality

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VRF ( Variable Refrigerent Flow)

Variable refrigerant flow (VRF) is a HVAC technology invented in Japan by Daikin company around 1982. Like ductless mini-splits VRFs use refrigerant as a cooling and heating medium. This refrigerant is conditioned by a single outdoor condensing unit, and is circulated within the building to multiple Fan-Coil Units (FCUs).

The modular design of VRF results in great energy savings providing occupants choice to air condition or heat only the zones in use. A VRF system provides exceptional dehumidification and temperature control by rapidly adapting to changing loads.

Following are the world’s reliable VRF system manufacturer:

  • Panasonic 
  • Fujitsu
  • Mitsubishi
  • Daikin
  • Toshiba
  • LG
  • Samsung

 

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Building Information Model

A Building Information Model is a kind of intelligent, 3D model for Building. This allows everyone involved in the building lifecycle – Owners, Developers, Architects, Engineers, and Contractors,  – to  seamlessly manage and share information.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) accommodates many of the functions needed to model the lifecycle of a building, providing the basis for new construction capabilities and changes in the roles and relationships among a project stakeholders. it can smoothly facilitates an integrated design and construction process that results in better quality buildings at lower cost and reduced project duration.

BIM produces construction documents that resemble those created by 2D CAD Drafting, but are done much faster and contain information about structure, quantities, materials and other data that can be used in both — Construction and Management of a building. Designers can analyze the building design in detail and locate human errors, if any by BIM implementation.

BIM  provides adequate information for building performance analysis and evaluation, which is of vital importance for Sustainable Building Design. in a same time it produces  accurate and extremely reliable information about the Building  structure, system and materials used,  it can generate energy efficiency, daylighting enabling  green building design and aspects criteria.

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Building Construction Printer By MIT Univercity

The list of materials that can be produced by 3-D printing has grown to include not just plastics but also metal, glass, and even food. Now, MIT researchers are expanding the list further, with the design of a system that can 3-D print the basic structure of an entire building.

Structures built with this system could be produced faster and less expensively than traditional construction methods allow, the researchers say. A building could also be completely customized to the needs of a particular site and the desires of its maker. Even the internal structure could be modified in new ways; different materials could be incorporated as the process goes along, and material density could be varied to provide optimum combinations of strength, insulation, or other properties.

Ultimately, the researchers say, this approach could enable the design and construction of new kinds of buildings that would not be feasible with traditional building methods.

The robotic system is described this week in the journal Science Robotics, in a paper by Steven Keating PhD ’16, a mechanical engineering graduate and former research affiliate in the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab; Julian Leland and Levi Cai, both research assistants in the Mediated Matter group; and Neri Oxman, group director and associate professor of media arts and sciences.

The system consists of a tracked vehicle that carries a large, industrial robotic arm, which has a smaller, precision-motion robotic arm at its end. This highly controllable arm can then be used to direct any conventional (or unconventional) construction nozzle, such as those used for pouring concrete or spraying insulation material, as well as additional digital fabrication end effectors, such as a milling head.

Unlike typical 3-D printing systems, most of which use some kind of an enclosed, fixed structure to support their nozzles and are limited to building objects that can fit within their overall enclosure, this free-moving system can construct an object of any size. As a proof of concept, the researchers used a prototype to build the basic structure of the walls of a 50-foot-diameter, 12-foot-high dome — a project that was completed in less than 14 hours of “printing” time.

For these initial tests, the system fabricated the foam-insulation framework used to form a finished concrete structure. This construction method, in which polyurethane foam molds are filled with concrete, is similar to traditional commercial insulated-concrete formwork techniques. Following this approach for their initial work, the researchers showed that the system can be easily adapted to existing building sites and equipment, and that it will fit existing building codes without requiring whole new evaluations, Keating explains.

Ultimately, the system is intended to be self-sufficient. It is equipped with a scoop that could be used to both prepare the building surface and acquire local materials, such as dirt for a rammed-earth building, for the construction itself. The whole system could be operated electrically, even powered by solar panels. The idea is that such systems could be deployed to remote regions, for example in the developing world, or to areas for disaster relief after a major storm or earthquake, to provide durable shelter rapidly.

The ultimate vision is “in the future, to have something totally autonomous, that you could send to the moon or Mars or Antarctica, and it would just go out and make these buildings for years,” says Keating, who led the development of the system as his doctoral thesis work.

But in the meantime, he says, “we also wanted to show that we could build something tomorrow that could be used right away.” That’s what the team did with its initial mobile platform. “With this process, we can replace one of the key parts of making a building, right now,” he says. “It could be integrated into a building site tomorrow.”

“The construction industry is still mostly doing things the way it has for hundreds of years,” says Keating. “The buildings are rectilinear, mostly built from single materials, put together with saws and nails,” and mostly built from standardized plans.

But, Keating wondered, what if every building could be individualized and designed using on-site environmental data? In the future, the supporting pillars of such a building could be placed in optimal locations based on ground-penetrating radar analysis of the site, and walls could have varying thickness depending on their orientation. For example, a building could have thicker, more insulated walls on its north side in cold climates, or walls that taper from bottom to top as their load-bearing requirements decrease, or curves that help the structure withstand winds.

The creation of this system, which the researchers call a Digital Construction Platform (DCP), was motivated by the Mediated Matter group’s overall vision of designing buildings without parts. Such a vision includes, for example, combining “structure and skin,” and beams and windows, in a single production process, and adapting multiple design and construction processes on the fly, as the structure is being built.

From an architectural perspective, Oxman says, the project “challenges traditional building typologies such as walls, floors, or windows, and proposes that a single system could be fabricated using the DCP that can vary its properties continuously to create wall-like elements that continuously fuse into windows.”

To this end, the nozzles of the new 3-D printing system can be adapted to vary the density of the material being poured, and even to mix different materials as it goes along. In the version used in the initial tests, the device created an insulating foam shell that would be left in place after the concrete is poured; interior and exterior finish materials could be applied directly to that foam surface.

The system can even create complex shapes and overhangs, which the team demonstrated by including a wide, built-in bench in their prototype dome. Any needed wiring and plumbing can be inserted into the mold before the concrete is poured, providing a finished wall structure all at once. It can also incorporate data about the site collected during the process, using built-in sensors for temperature, light, and other parameters to make adjustments to the structure as it is built.

Keating says the team’s analysis shows that such construction methods could produce a structure faster and less expensively than present methods can, and would also be much safer. (The construction industry is one of the most dangerous occupations, and this system requires less hands-on work.) In addition, because shapes and thicknesses can be optimized for what is needed structurally, rather than having to match what’s available in premade lumber and other materials, the total amount of material needed could be reduced.

While the platform represents an engineering advance, Oxman notes. “Making it faster, better, and cheaper is one thing. But the ability to design and digitally fabricate multifunctional structures in a single build embodies a shift from the machine age to the biological age — from considering the building as a machine to live in, made of standardized parts, to the building as an organism, which is computationally grown, additively manufactured, and possibly biologically augmented.”

“So to me it’s not merely a printer,” she says, “but an entirely new way of thinking about making, that facilitates a paradigm shift in the area of digital fabrication, but also for architectural design. … Our system points to a future vision of digital construction that enables new possibilities on our planet and beyond.”

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zt_3Gs1ksg

Story Source:

Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original written by David L. Chandler. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.