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Whole building life cycle assessment for residential buildings : a design improvement framework

University of British Columbia

The environmental impacts of building stock have received significant attention in recent years, as buildings consume more than 40% of the world’s energy and release one third of total greenhouse gas emissions. In the past, most efforts were focused on mitigating environmental impacts during the operational stage of buildings, while the environmental performance of the other life cycle stages received limited attention. In an attempt to address this limitation, whole-building life cycle assessment (WBLCA) has become a trend in order to ensure the best environmental performance of a building in holistic terms. However, research studies usually face challenges to systematically evaluating WBLCA performance at the design stage due to the complexity of assessments at the building level. On the other hand, there are very few studies that consider environmental and economic impacts simultaneously at the building level. Furthermore, the current WBLCA studies usually end after the LCA results are calculated and interpreted. There is no study that provides a building design improvement method based on the final LCA results. The main goal of this research is to develop a design improvement framework based on the proposed WBLCA method to evaluate and improve the environmental and economic performance at the building level. The Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) methods were adopted at the building level to ensure the WBLCA is comprehensive and reliable. Building Information Modelling (BIM) and life cycle cost (LCC) were used to ensure the building assemblies are accurate, and to provide dynamic material updates with associated costs for the design improvement framework. The fuzzy-based multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approach was used to compare the comprehensive building-level LCA results, and select the most suitable building design by considering all the environmental and economic impacts at different life cycle stages. The deliverables of this research will aid in decision making for sustainable urban planning and environmental performances in the building sector. The developed design improvement framework will assist building designers in efficiently improving the WBLCA performance by highlighting the most critical life cycle stages and building assemblies while considering the economic performance. The BIM-based WBLCA approach will contribute to the development of a digital platform that can also support designers through dynamic WBLCA results in the design revision stages.

Text

2020-10-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/76391

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/