A benchmark study on housing defects in Victoria, Australia

The construction industry consists of many small businesses employing less than five people. A challenge to the construction industry is to ensure that the many small firms and sub-contractors keep producing quality housing to meet the needs of their customers and clients. In attempts to continually improve the quality of housing various policies and mechanisms have been adopted. These have included industry sponsored quality programs and industry administered builder registration. However, these attempts have failed because of consumer mistrust of industry-sponsored programs. In addition, these mechanisms have been introduced in isolation and not as a part of an integrated industry initiative that includes education and training from the trade to tertiary level construction management courses. This work contributes to knowledge through a detailed on-going study of housing quality and defects. This research identifies the common forms of defects, which occur in housing and their incidences. The overall aim of this paper is to report the identification of defects in housing and the establishment of benchmarks (or a baseline) for the incidence defects in various functional elements within a house. It also suggests the areas where defects are likely to occur. From the knowledge gained from the study, industry and governments may make informed decisions of where resources may be directed to the areas where it will be most beneficial both to the house builder and the end user (customer). For this to occur the findings of this research will be disseminated into the housing industry and eventually integrated into tertiary courses in building and construction
management.

Seeding of single crystal superalloys--Role of seed melt-back on casting defects

Single crystal seeds of the nickel-base superalloy CMSX-4 have been partially melted in a temperature gradient and then quenched. Small islands of random orientation are observed throughout the melted-back semi-solid. These random orientations appear to be pinched-off secondary dendrite arms, but there is no evidence that they are transported ahead of the dendrite tips to nucleate stray grains during directional solidification.