Life Cycle Cost Assessment and Retrofit in Community Scale: A Case Study of Jordan

Abstract

In the last few years, the renovation and refurbishment of existing buildings have been recognized as one of the main strategies to achieve energy efficiency and sustainability goals. However, the current studies have mainly focused on the retrofit, life cycle assessment (LCA), and Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of buildings in isolation without envisaging the impact of microclimate and the surrounding buildings on the outcome of energy simulation. Specifically, many energy simulation software needs to include the environmental responses when buildings are treated with outdoor conditions based on weather data from the nearest metrological site. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of microclimate on retrofit and LCC of a community of buildings rather than a single isolated building. For this purpose, a coupling method is developed to integrate building energy simulation (BES) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), which exchange parameters on a dynamic time step basis using Envi-met to create weather files from microclimate parameters and use it on energy simulation through DesignBuilder software. Furthermore, this study interlinks the life cycle cost assessment and retrofit strategies on a community scale. A case study of Amman – Jordan, is selected in this paper by one a residential building with two floors and an area of 450. At the same time, the retrofit strategy is considered as implementing green roofs for community areas, which are implemented in the context around the buildings. In addition, this study calculates the net present value and the pack period regarding the life cycle cost study. The initial result shows that there is an impact for microclimate parameters on the temperatures gained on the building's envelope as a result of the effect of airflow through context parameters, which in turn affect the value of energy consumption used for cooling inside the buildings. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that using green roofs on one of the neighbourhood buildings will decrease energy consumption by 28% in the simulated time while the payback period is 9.5 years.