A dynamic life cycle assessment model for long-term carbon emissions prediction of buildings: A passive building as case study

Abstract

Carbon emissions of buildings in the life cycle are huge due to the high resource-intensive and energy consumption of the buildings industry and its upstream industries. And for carbon emissions prediction of the buildings, the life cycle assessment (LCA) with the static parameters input was used to obtain long-term carbon emissions for the buildings in the existed studies. The study presented a dynamic LCA model to predict life cycle carbon emissions of the buildings and optimize the insulation parameter with the improved temporal validation of upstream parameters. A case passive building was selected to perform the dynamic method based on the basic and operational information of this building. The key temporal parameters were collected and predicted via grey prediction. And the electric mix structure was predicted via scenario analysis method. The dynamic life cycle carbon emissions of energy systems were evaluated in different scenarios by the combination of predicting results and historical data. The life cycle carbon emissions of the case building in temporal scenarios reduced approximately 23.4% of that in static scenario. Also, optimal insulation layer thickness in temporal scenarios of and that in static scenario were 130 mm, 120 mm and 250 mm, respectively.