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Buildings account for 40% of energy consumption. In a hot humid climate zone a great deal of this energy is consumed in cooling and air-conditioning. Thermal insulation provides a practicable and cost-effective means of reducing system electricity consumption and CO 2 emissions. Building insulation refers to any construction material in a building used as insulation for thermal purposes. This term also applies to acoustic insulation, fire protection and impact insulation. This paper presents a study on awareness of housing developers and home owners on the utilization of insulation materials in the building industry. The research aims to address and determine challenges facing the implementation of building insulation techniques in Malaysia, where currently houses with insulation represent less than 2% of the total stock of 4.5 million units. In this study two methods have been implemented i.e. (1) a quantitative survey in the form of two different sets of structured questionnaires for housing developers and end users, and (2) qualitative research in the form of a semi-structured interview targeting various professionals and stakeholders from the construction industry. The study suggests that around 75% of house occupants use airconditioner units to improve the indoor thermal comfort and only 22% of the respondents were aware of the effects of insulation on thermal performance of

Increased usage of air-conditioners in buildings leads to higher levels of electricity and energy consumption. Thermal insulation improves energyefficiency of buildings by retarding heat flow through building envelopes and thus reducing indoor cooling load. This research investigates the potential of two cement replacement materials, which are silica fume and Microwave Incinerated Rice Husk Ash (MIRHA), incorporated in cement paste as thermal insulation. Samples of cement paste with varying volumes of silica fume and MIRHA were prepared and evaluated on their thermal conductivity values. Their viability as building materials were then evaluated by measuring their permeable porosities and compressive strengths at three (3), seven (7) and 28 days of curing. Results show that higher dosage of silica fume and MIRHA in cement paste lead to lower thermal conductivity but negatively affect compressive strength and permeable porosity. MIRHA reduces thermal conductivity more efficiently than silica fume but leads to a faster decline in compressive strength and increase in permeable porosity. The lowest thermal conductivity value obtained in this experiment was 0.4273 Wm-1 K-1 , which was achieved by samples with MIRHA incorporated at 25% of cement paste volume.

Displacements, velocities and accelerations of Six Degree of freedom of a single floating structure was predicted using Time Series NARX feedback neural Networks. The nonlinear autoregressive network with exogenous inputs (NARX) is a recurrent dynamic network, with feedback connections enclosing several layers of the network is based on the linear ARX model, which is commonly used in time-series modelling is used in this study. Time series data of displacements of a single floating structure was used for training and testing the ANN model. In the training stage, this time series data of environment parameters was used as input and dynamic responses was used as target. Benchmarking result and error prediction was compared between two techniques of Neural Network training. The prediction result of the model responses can be concluded that NARX with mirroring technique increase the accuracy and can be used to predict time series of dynamic responses of floating structures.

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