Towards a Methodological Approach to Builder Specific, Preconstruction Airtightness Estimates for Light-Framed, Detached, Low-Rise Residential Buildings in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research is an investigation into residential building airtightness. Its purpose is to establish a methodology to predict preconstruction airtightness in Canadian homes. The dissertation presented an analysis of a large, national blower door testing population, numbering over 900,000 low-rise detached homes. The relationship between airtightness and various building factors, such as; insulation levels, building size, and year of construction, is explored. Regressionbased models were found to be highly significant (p<<0.01) and explained up to 48% (R = 0.69, p<<0.01) of whole building airtightness. The national models’ scope was confined to predicting airtightness in existing homes with heterogeneous wall construction. In order to estimate preconstruction airtightness in conventionally constructed homes, a local blower door testing population of nearly 3000 homes was examined. Three builder-specific, geometricbased, temporally independent, multiple linear regression models were developed. Some of these builder-specific models were found to be strong, and explained over 58% (R = 0.79, p<<0.001) of whole building airtightness. A five variable, geometrically based model which controlled for handicraft was found to be very strong, explaining up to 73% (R = 0.87, p<<0.001) of the whole building airtightness. The regression-based analyses on the local population suggests that air leakage is prominent through two building details: the floor-to-wall details, and at the window-to-wall assemblies. An empirically based design of experiments was devised to quantify the impact of air leakage through a floor-to-wall detail. A very strong laboratory-based model explained up to 88% of the air leakage through the floor-to-wall joint (R = 0.95, p<<0.001). A builder-specific, temporally-independent model was combined with the empirically-based, floor-to-wall model to illustrate the applicability of the approach residential building designers. The synthesis of the two models resulted in a novel, whole building, preconstruction airtightness forecasting model. The dissertation demonstrated that airtightness in homes could be estimated with temporally independent, builder-specific, and geometrically-based preconstruction models. The estimation approach spurred models that were stronger in explanatory power, and industrial applicability as compared to previous airtightness models.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.046 | 0.099 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".