No. 1 - Structural Design of Buildings for Northern Australia

NASH has developed a new technical note to assist designers when designing for Northern Australia. Due to the very high wind speeds associated with tropical cyclones, buildings in these northern regions require particular attention to both structural design and detailing to ensure that the applied actions can be resisted and transferred to the foundations.  Wind pressures can be up to 6 times greater than those designed for the southern parts of Australia due to:

•      higher wind speeds

•      greater internal pressure

•      lower terrain roughness due to disallowing the effect of vegetation in cyclonic regions.

Whilst the Technical Note was written specially for cyclonic regions, most of the principles apply to buildings constructed in non cyclonic regions.

No. 2 - Six-Star Energy Efficiency Measures for Houses

Following requests from members, we have prepared the attached technical note on achieving 6 star energy rating with steel framing. The technical note concentrates on acceptable solutions as well as briefly covering the background and software solutions.

Through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), all states and territories have committed to adopt 6 stars.  South Australia, Queensland and ACT have already adopted it and Western Australia and Victoria will adopt it with the new edition of the Building code of Australia (BCA2011) on May 1.

We would like to thank Kingspan, Foilboard and BlueScope Steel for their assistance in the preparation of this Note.

No. 3 - Telecommunications Reception in Residential and Low-Rise Buildings

This Technical Note discusses some of the factors that lead to better or poorer telecommunications performance in homes and similarly constructed buildings.  The transmission and reception of radio waves for voice and data communication, entertainment, navigation and security is an integral part of modern life.  Radio wave use, particularly for mobile applications, is growing in all parts of the world including Australia.  Inevitably this means that the radio signals that we rely on are required to pass through both natural features as well as objects in the built environment.  How successfully the signals do this depends on many factors, some controllable and some not.