The BRITE (Building Research Information Technology and Environment) project was established by the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation to encourage innovation in the construction industry. While innovation is generally perceived to be broadly beneficial, there has been little formal study of its occurrence or impact in Australian construction or of the factors which foster an innovative atmosphere within an enterprise. In order to benchmark innovation performance, the BRITE project conducted a survey in 2004 into the nature, incidence and variety of technological and organisational innovations in various sectors of the industry. With some exceptions, the survey found that clients and consultants engaged in significantly higher levels of innovation than did suppliers, main contractors or trade contractors. Within the industry sectors those organisations classified as high innovators favoured the adoption of advanced management practices and had formal evaluation systems in place to judge their progress. They reported significant positive impacts on their profitability from innovation and can therefore provide instructive examples for the rest of the industry to follow.
Research indicates that many of symptoms attributed to the Sick Building Syndrome in air-conditioned office buildings are a result of considerably reduced negative ions in the internal atmosphere and that replacing the depleted negative ions can improve indoor air quality. This paper describes a method used to develop a formula (DOF-NIL formula) for calculating the amount of negative ions to be added to air-conditioned buildings, to improve air quality. The formula enables estimates to be made based on how negative ions in the air are reduced by three main factors namely, Video Display Terminals (VDT); heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and Building Contents (BC). Calculations for a typical air-conditioned office, are compared with an Air Ion Counter instrument. The results show that the formula, when applied to a typical air-conditioned office, provides an accurate estimate for design purposes. The typical rate of additional negative-ions (ion-generating) for a negative ion condition is found to be approximately 12.0 billion ions/hr for at least 4 hour ion-generating.
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