Abstract
The construction industry is an important driver for economic growth, but it is also a major contributor to global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. A plethora of sustainable design tools and rating schemes have been developed in an attempt to improve the environmental performance of buildings. Regardless of their increasing adoption by the construction industry, much of the existing focus is on improving the operational performance of buildings. However, a more holistic life cycle approach that also considers material production is critical. Despite this, limited information and tools are available that consider the full life cycle at the point where decisions can have the greatest impact – at the early stages of design. This paper presents a web-based tool to assist environmental decision-making by providing information on the life cycle energy loadings of building envelope assemblies at the early stages of design. Real-time embodied energy calculations are combined with cloud-based building energy simulation within a graphical user interface that enables exploration of different alternatives through interactive visualisations. This paper describes the tool, an output of over 10 years of research, and how it can be used to inform building envelope assembly selection to reduce life cycle energy.
Highlights
Buildings represent one of the greatest opportunities for reducing fossil-fuel energy demand and global greenhouse gas emissions [1]
The construction industry is an important driver for economic growth, but it is a major contributor to global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions
The selection of building envelope materials is often done during the early stages of design, and as such it is here where design decisions can often have the greatest influence on the life cycle energy performance of a building
Summary
Buildings represent one of the greatest opportunities for reducing fossil-fuel energy demand and global greenhouse gas emissions [1]. The types and quantities of materials used within a building have a significant influence on its life cycle energy This is the case for building envelope materials, which control the thermal performance of the building as well as contributing to a considerable proportion of a building’s embodied energy. Currently available LCA tools can be costly and/or time consuming to implement, are limited in their coverage of the broad life cycle effects of materials, or lack comprehensiveness in the data that is used. This limits the ability for designers to make a quick and reliable assessment of potential building assembly alternatives.
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