Lisø PhD Dissertation Manuscript - NTNU

An important aspect of the programme will be the
preparation of a thorough overview of the relevant
regional climatic loads that should be taken into account
during the total life cycle of the built environment,
in order to develop climate adapted highperformance
technical solutions, with a reliability
level that reflects the different climatic impacts the
constructions or materials actually are being exposed
to. The basis for calculating characteristic wind and
snow loads on buildings in different parts of the
country is regulated by Norwegian and international
standards. At present there are very few, if any, corresponding,
easily accessible design guidelines for
assessing geographically dependent climatic exposures
related to external moisture loads.
2 METHODOLOGY
SINTEF Building and Infrastructure’s project archive
contains information on more than 33,000 projects
in a wide range of disciplines carried out by the
institute in the period from 1964 until today. Key
data on these projects are stored in a Microsoft SQLserver
database.
The institute has undertaken analyses of building
defects for more than 50 years, both on behalf of the
construction industry and in comprehensive field investigations.
Information on these assignments is
filed in the institute’s central archive, and registered
electronically in the SQL-server database. Information
on the following key data is registered electronically:
Client, project number, project leader, report
date, age of the building, building address, construction
method, keywords and summary. The summary
provides overall information on the type, location,
scope and cause of the defect.
However, owing to incomplete summaries and
keywords in the database, and also insufficient registration
routines for building defect assignments in
the early years of registration, a tremendous and
time-consuming effort has been undertaken to extract
process induced building defect assignments
from the archives. Several thousand projects register
as hits when searching with “defect” as the keyword.
Unfortunately, not all building defect assignments
are found in the database even when searching for
“defect”. Therefore, a comprehensive investigation
of paper copies of assignment reports has been undertaken
to isolate the process induced building defect
assignments. Detailed information on each assignment
is obtained from the paper copies, which
are being thoroughly analysed as part of the ongoing
investigation and establishment of the institute’s
process induced building defects database.
The information on each assignment is stored in a
spreadsheet program, linked electronically to information
in the SQL-server database, allowing for indepth
statistical analyses. Altogether it is found that
the institute has approximately 5,000 process induced
building defect assignment reports from the
period from 1964 until today.
3 RESULTS
The inflow of building defect assignment reports to
the project archive is based on commercial consultancy
assignments from different actors in the construction
industry, and thus do not represent a systematic
or in any way planned selection of building
defect cases.
Table 1. Existing stock of residential buildings distributed by
building type and county, as of January 2005 (source: Statistics
Norway, www.ssb.no*).
Total A B C D E
Total 1,400,727 1,104,641 134,496 128,956 28,547 4,087
Østfold 82,498 65,255 8,585 7,389 1,075 194
Akershus 140,349 97,200 17,287 23,707 1,794 361
Oslo 65,810 23,922 12,962 18,792 10,032 102
Hedmark 75,868 67,956 3,985 3,296 431 200
Oppland 73,260 65,182 4,929 2,477 391 281
Buskerud 78,526 65,247 7,562 4,681 855 181
Vestfold 69,649 56,413 6,353 5,814 872 197
Telemark 58,874 52,593 3,141 2,340 606 194
Aust-Agder 38,133 35,177 1,460 1,239 141 116
Vest-Agder 50,920 40,513 4,270 5,357 616 164
Rogaland 121,408 98,408 13,079 8,461 1,213 247
Hordaland 129,218 94,894 11,183 17,550 5,333 258
Sogn og
Fjordane
40,206 35,701 2,314 1,907 131 153
Møre og
Romsdal
82,274 67,995 8,005 5,342 733 199
Sør-
Trøndelag
78,334 56,667 11,291 7,374 2,533 469
Nord-
Trøndelag
47,596 40,558 4,060 2,477 292 209
Nordland 88,310 74,174 7,509 5,641 692 294
Troms 51,597 45,141 3,336 2,407 586 127
Finnmark 27,897 21,645 3,185 2,705 221 141
A = Detached house/ B = House with two dwellings
C = Undetached house, house built together and house with 3 or 4
dwellings/ D = Block of flats (multi-dwelling building)/ E = Residences
for communities
* An overview of the existing stock of non-residential buildings
(2,285,665 buildings) can also be found at this website.
Figure 1 presents a distribution of registered
building defects distributed by type of clients.
Figure 2 presents a distribution of building defects
by building type. 61% of the cases of defects or
damage are related to residential buildings. 38% of
the total numbers of buildings in Norway are residential
buildings. I.e. buildings for residential purposes
are over-represented in the archive. An overview
of the Norwegian stock of residential buildings
is given in Table 1.
Domestic buildings are e.g. detached houses,
semi-detached houses, undetached houses, houses