Skip to 0 minutes and 14 seconds Why does a spot of mould suddenly appear on your ceiling or wall? What are those white deposits appearing on the outside of buildings and electrical fixtures? Building Pathology is a course on the science of building defects and failures. Defects can happen as a result of normal wear and tear of a building’s component or materials, or it could be the result of an untimely failure due to issues in design, construction or use of a new building. Hello, I am Dr Zahiruddin Fitri, your course educator from the Department of Building Surveying, Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Malaya.
Skip to 0 minutes and 51 seconds I have been teaching building pathology to Building Surveying students at this university since 2012 and have conducted numerous surveys on buildings to find out the real causes of defects. In this course we will be exploring why buildings fail so that you will be able to identify defects in your home so that action could be taken to rectify them. We will look at several common building materials such as timber, metal, concrete and bricks and see what causes them to fail. We will also be discussing water and moisture and how does it affect buildings so profoundly. We are going to learn how building pathologist investigate and confirm root causes of defects and the tools that they use to investigate them.
Skip to 1 minute and 40 seconds I will be also guiding you each week on the topics that we are discussing and to answer any questions that you may have and help you discuss and understand building material behaviour. I hope this course will be able to help you understand the mechanism of defects and to tackle issues of defects in your own home. I look forward to learning with you over the next few weeks and hope that you’ll enjoy the course.
