Assessment on Embodied Energy of Non-Load Bearing Walls for Office Buildings

Sanaz Salehian,Muhammad Ismail,Ati Ariffin

doi:10.3390/buildings10040079

Abstract

Two important factors that have been put in the limelight in the current age are environmental concerns and sustainable future. The building sector has emerged as an important player in this matter due to their contribution into the large share of resources and energy consumption as well as harmful greenhouse gas emission. This paper discusses the percentage of embodied energy (EE) in two common building wall materials in Malaysia: steel and concrete. Concrete is used in concrete non-load bearing walls and steel is used to manufacture curtain walls. Although there are more materials used in the selected case studies, steel and concrete possess the high amount of embodied energy. Thus, the concrete wall and curtain wall in the lifecycle analysis (LCA) pre-use phase in high-rise office buildings in Malaysia are considered in this research. GaBi software is used to evaluate and calculate embodied energy in the case studies. The functional unit for this LCA study is determined as one cubic meter of concrete non-load bearing wall and curtain wall. In order to determine the components included in the analysis, input-output flowcharts are created for each process. The comparison of these walls shows that curtain wall has more embodied energy than concrete. The highest amount of embodied energy in curtain wall construction for case B is 4873.89 MJ, and for the case A is 4851.09 MJ approximately. The amount of EE in the concrete non-load bearing wall for both case studies are the lowest amount, with 278.85 MJ for case A and 280.66 MJ for case B. Results also show that the manufacturing of materials is the biggest contribution to the amount of EE at more than 50%, whereas transportation is between 1.83% and 3.77% only.

Highlights

The construction industry is one of the main contributors to the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions and it consumes 16% of the world’s freshwater, 25% of the harvested timber and 40% of produced energy
The consumption of energy in the building sector has been categorized into embodied energy (EE) and operational energy (OE) [5,6,7,8]
The transportation of inventories for concrete and curtain wall from mines to factories and factories to the site are presented in Tables 4 and 5, respectively

Summary

Introduction

The construction industry is one of the main contributors to the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions and it consumes 16% of the world’s freshwater, 25% of the harvested timber and 40% of produced energy. This industry contributes to 40% of global carbon dioxide emission and nearly the same amount of primary energy use (30–40%), resulting in half of the global greenhouse emissions (40–50%) [1,2,3,4]. Energy consumption is considered a major concern in the construction sector and it has been put under the spotlight to tackle global environmental issues. OE is the energy that is primarily used in regulating the indoor environment of a building through heating and cooling [5,6,10,11]

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion