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Ramos Guerrero, Jorge Andrés

University of British Columbia

With increasing demand to reduce the carbon emission of buildings, it is crucial to quantify the life cycle environmental impact of new buildings, including the environmental impact due to natural hazards, such as earthquakes. In this thesis, a novel and comprehensive probabilistic framework has been developed to quantify the environmental impact of buildings, including uncertainties in the extraction and production, transportation, construction, seismic exposure and aging (including deterioration) and end-of-life stages. The developed framework is used to quantify the environmental impact of a 3-storey residential building located in Vancouver, Canada. The results show that there is a significant variation in the environmental impact of the prototype building in each stage of the life cycle assessment stages. If the prototype building is hit by the design level earthquake, it is expected that the median environmental impact for the prototype will be further increased by 43%. In addition, by accounting for the probability of occurrence of different earthquakes within a 50-year design life of the prototype building, the earthquake related damage will result in an additional 5% of the initial carbon emission of the building. This shows the importance of including earthquake hazard and deterioration in whole building life cycle assessments.

Text

2022-08-12

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82351

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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