Sustainable construction and in particular the sustainability of materials is a global issue with legislation on material properties and product performance at the forefront. In traditional constructed buildings however, it can be extremely challenging to get accurate data on performance. The variability of building materials design, manufacture and construction from different eras is substantial, even within local areas due to the vernacular nature of construction from these periods. Material properties testing can be expensive and is not always readily available when required and is therefore often ignored, particularly in the retrofitting of historic buildings. This can have major adverse effects on the building fabric and for its inhabitant's health if the appropriate material interventions are not chosen. An inexpensive environmental chamber for testing such materials has been designed and built at the Dublin Institute of Technology, (DIT) Ireland, adopting comparable standards from EN ISO 8990 and ASTM C1363. This paper describes the design requirements for the construction of an affordable and mobile calibrated hot box (CHB) for the testing of historic materials. A characterisation panel has been used to carry out early calibration testing and the results of this are discussed. Improvements and tweaking of the first test are also discussed.

Awareness of leading‐edge erosion (LEE) on wind turbine blades, and the impacts it can have on annual energy production (AEP) have increased significantly over recent years. This is especially important in offshore environments, where a combination of more extreme weather and higher tip speeds result in higher rates of erosion. In this paper the impact of LEE on AEP has been quantified and the derived method validated. The DTU 10‐MW reference wind turbine (RWT) is used to demonstrate the method. An equivalent sand grain roughness approach in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used to simulate clean and roughened aerofoil performance. These CFD results are applied to a blade element momentum (BEM) model of the turbine to generate clean and eroded power curves. Finally, a wind distribution from Anholt offshore wind farm is used to estimate the AEP for the clean and eroded cases. An AEP loss of 0.7% was computed for the specific case considered in this study. This result is benchmarked against those from previously published studies. Most research into LEE has thus far focussed on either estimating the impacts on AEP or mitigating against them, with less emphasis on understanding the physical aerodynamic changes that result in reduced energy output. In this paper, the significance of bypass transition on the AEP loss caused by roughness, specifically as it relates to the operational angles of attack of the blade, is examined and found to impact turbine efficiency in this case for over 56% of the total operating time.

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