Natural Frequency Journal :: Issue No. 001
Published: January 01, 2006

The most efficient approach when undertaking any form of work is to minimise your own effort whilst maximising the potential benefits and/or impacts that may flow from it. This should also be true of simulation and analysis work. This article discusses ways you can approach a project to achieve this, presenting a simple example to illustrate this idea in practice.

With its highly visual approach to building analysis and simulation, ECOTECT has enormous scope to be used as a teaching resource at any level in both architecture and engineering courses. This article aims to provide some guidance on how to introduce ECOTECT to students. It discusses some of the main problems sometimes encountered and offers a series of suggestions for avoiding them. Whilst it concentrates on coursework integration, you should also check out some of the examples of its demonstration potential.

Open plan offices can be a difficult acoustic environment to design for. The ceiling is often the only surface you can use for any form of acoustic control. However, with the increasing use of exposed thermal mass, termodeck or chilled beams, even this surface is becoming off-limits. This article looks at some of the acoustic issues in open plan offices and considers how ceilings can accommodate these varies requirements.