| 1. |
- di Bari, R., et al.
(författare)
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Buildings LCA and digitalization: Designers' toolbox based on a survey
- 2022
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Ingår i: IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. - : IOP Publishing. - 1755-1307 .- 1755-1315. ; 1078:1
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In a context of digitalization and increasing quality requirements, the building sector is facing an increasing level of complexity regarding its design process. This results in a growing number of involved actors from different domains, a multitude of tasks to be completed and a higher degree of needed expertise. New buildings are also required to reach higher performances in terms of environmental quality. To that regard, the exploitation of the full potential of digital tools can facilitate the integration of environmental aspects in the planning process, limit productivity shortcomings and reduce environmental impacts, which can result from an unaware decision making. Building environmental assessment can be performed through several Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)-based tools. “Pure calculation” tools quantify final buildings' environmental potential, while “complex tools” additionally support decision making during the planning process. It is often difficult to choose the best suitable tool, which strongly depends on the user's needs. Within the IEA EBC Annex 72, a survey was realized with the main objective of creating a comprehensive overview of the existing tools dedicated to buildings LCA. The questionnaire included the usability, functionality, compliance, data reliability and interoperability of the analysed tools. Lastly, based on the survey outcomes and their critical assessment, a procedure for the identification and selection of a tool has been proposed based on user's needs. As a result, this work outlines main features of currently available building LCA tools, for which there is a harmonized status in terms of usability and overall applied LCA methodology. Despite the need for more automatized workflows, tools' embedding is mostly not yet applicable in system chains or limited to a restricted number of tools.
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| 2. |
- Habert, Guillaume, et al.
(författare)
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Carbon budgets for buildings: harmonising temporal, spatial and sectoral dimensions
- 2020
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Ingår i: Buildings and Cities. - : Ubiquity Press, Ltd.. - 2632-6655. ; 1:1, s. 429-452
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Target values for creating carbon budgets for buildings are important for developing climate-neutral building stocks. A lack of clarity currently exists for defining carbon budgets for buildings and what constitutes a unit of assessment—particularly the distinction between production-and consumption-based accounting. These different perspectives on the system and the function that is assessed hinder a clear and commonly agreed definition of ‘carbon budgets’ for building construction and operation. This paper explores the processes for establishing a carbon budget for residential and non-residential buildings. A detailed review of current approaches to budget allocation is presented. The temporal and spatial scales of evaluation are considered as well as the distribution rules for sharing the budget between parties or activities. This analysis highlights the crucial need to define the temporal scale, the roles of buildings as physical artefacts and their economic activities. A framework is proposed to accommodate these different perspectives and spatio-temporal scales towards harmonised and comparable cross-sectoral budget definitions. Policy relevance The potential to develop, implement and monitor greenhouse gas-related policies and strategies for buildings will depend on the provision of clear targets. Based on global limits, a carbon budget can establish system boundaries and scalable targets. An operational framework is presented that clarifies greenhouse gas targets for buildings in the different parts of the world that is adaptable to the context and circumstances of a particular place. A carbon budget can enable national regulators to set feasible and legally binding requirements. This will assist the many different stakeholders responsible for decisions on buildings to coordinate and incorporate their specific responsibility at one specific level or scale of activity to ensure overall compliance. Therefore, determining a task specific carbon budget requires an appropriate management of the global carbon budget to ensure that specific budgets overlap, but that the sum of them is equal to the available global budget without double-counting.
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| 3. |
- Harrison, Josie, 1989, et al.
(författare)
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Scalability in Building Component Data Annotation: Enhancing Facade Material Classification with Synthetic Data
- 2024
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the European Conference on Computing in Construction. - 2684-1150.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Computer vision models trained on Google Street View images can create material cadastres. However, current approaches need manually annotated datasets that are difficult to obtain and often have class imbalance. To address these challenges, this paper fine-tuned a Swin Transformer model on a synthetic dataset generated with OpenAI’s DALL E and compared the performance to a similar manually annotated dataset. Although manual annotation remains the gold standard, the synthetic dataset performance demonstrates a reasonable alternative. The findings will ease annotation needed to develop material cadastres, offering architects insights into opportunities for material reuse, thus contributing to the reduction of demolition waste.
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| 4. |
- Hlal, Fatima, 1989, et al.
(författare)
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Life Cycle Cost and Life Cycle Assessment of Composite Bridge with Flat and Corrugated Webs
- 2023
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Ingår i: ce/papers. ; 6, s. 574-579
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- To satisfy the sustainability criteria, a bridge design must be economically viable during its entire service life with a minimal impact on the environment. While stainless steel is known for its excellent life cycle performance, its high cost prevents it from being used in bridges to a larger extent. This study evaluates a new design solution that takes advantage of using corrugated web in bridge girders to overcome this issue. Three design concepts are evaluated for a three-span case-study bridge. These include a bridge with carbon steel flat web, stainless steel flat web, and stainless-steel corrugated web girders. Each design is optimized using a genetic algorithm. The three optimal solutions are then evaluated in terms of investment costs, life cycle costs (LCC) and life cycle impact. The results show that the investment costs in a flat web girder bridge increase by 27% when stainless steel is used instead of C-Mn (carbon) steel. However, this increase is only 10% when corrugated web girders are used. On the other hand, the LCC savings increase from 6% to 18% for corrugated web girders. Finally, the use of corrugated web in stainless steel leads to a reduction in the climate impacts of up to 32% compared to carbon steel for the studied bridge.
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| 5. |
- Hollberg, Alexander, 1985, et al.
(författare)
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Improving the collaboration between architects and energy consultants through design-integrated early BIM-tools
- 2019
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Ingår i: Building Simulation Conference Proceedings. - : IBPSA. - 2522-2708. - 9781713809418 ; 4, s. 2627-2633
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- There is a lack of optimization of buildings towards energy performance in early design stages in practice. Interviews with architects and energy consultants showed that one reason is the inefficient communication between these two groups. This paper investigates how a design-integrated early-BIM tool can improve the relation between architects and energy consultants to support an optimization process in early design stages and facilitate issuing energy performance certificates. Two case studies show that the early-BIM tool provides meaningful results for the architects involved and can reduce the input time for energy consultants by 50%. Furthermore, the simple 3D model functions as boundary object between the two groups and supports the collaboration.
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| 6. |
- Somanath, Sanjay, 1994, et al.
(författare)
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AI-baserad segementering av fasader för att optimera renovering i en större skala
- 2021
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Ingår i: Bygg och teknik. - 0281-658X. ; 2021:2, s. 26-29
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Hur kan vi på ett automatiskt sätt skapa mer detaljerade 3D modeller av byggnader i digitala tvillingar och förbättra indata för att beräkna energibesparingspotentialer i befintliga byggnader? I en pilotstudie har vi undersökt hur maskininlärning kan användas för att extrahera information om fönstersättning och storlek i befintliga byggnader. Vi har utvecklat en modell som har “tränats” att känna igen och segmenterar fönster från bilder med byggnadsfasader och på så sätt skapa digitala och mer detaljerade data för befintliga byggnader. Vårt långsiktiga mål är att utveckla en helautomatisk metod för analyser av renoveringspotentialer för byggnader och fastighetsportföljer.
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| 7. |
- Soust-Verdaguer, B., et al.
(författare)
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Implications of using systematic decomposition structures to organize building LCA information: A comparative analysis of national standards and guidelines- IEA EBC ANNEX 72
- 2020
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Ingår i: IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. - : IOP Publishing. - 1755-1307 .- 1755-1315. ; 588:2
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Introduction: The application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique to a building requires the collection and organization of a large amount of data over its life cycle. The systematic decomposition method can be used to classify building components, elements and materials, overcome specific difficulties that are encountered when attempting to complete the life cycle inventory and increase the reliability and transparency of results. In this paper, which was developed in the context of the research project IEA EBC Annex 72, we demonstrate the implications of taking such approach and describe the results of a comparison among different national standards/guidelines that are used to conduct LCA for building decomposition. Methods: We initially identified the main characteristics of the standards/guidelines used by Annex participant countries. The “be2226” reference office building was used as a reference to apply the different national standards/guidelines related to building decomposition. It served as a basis of comparison, allowing us to identify the implications of using different systems/standards in the LCA practice, in terms of how these differences affect the LCI structures, LCA databases and the methods used to communicate results. We also analyzed the implications of integrating these standards/guidelines into Building Information Modelling (BIM) to support LCA. Results: Twelve national classification systems/ standards/guidelines for the building decomposition were compared. Differences were identified among the levels of decomposition and grouping principles, as well as the consequences of these differences that were related to the LCI organization. In addition, differences were observed among the LCA databases and the structures of the results. Conclusions: The findings of this study summarize and provide an overview of the most relevant aspects of using a standardized building decomposition structure to conduct LCA. Recommendations are formulated on the basis of these findings.
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| 8. |
- Theißen, S., et al.
(författare)
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Concept for combining LCA and hazardous building material assessment for decision support using BIM
- 2022
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Ingår i: IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. - : IOP Publishing. - 1755-1307 .- 1755-1315. ; 1078:1
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The construction and building sector is responsible for a large part of the world's resource and energy consumption and is considered the largest global emitter of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Hazardous and toxic substances in building materials affect indoor air quality as well as the environment and thus have a high impact on human health, as we spend around 90 percent of our lives in buildings. Life cycle assessment (LCA) and hazardous building material requirements of green building certification systems allow to reduce the environmental and health impacts of building products and materials. However, they are usually very complex and time-consuming to perform and require expert knowledge to use the results for decision support. Digital approaches to support the simplified application of these methods and intuitive visualization of results are becoming increasingly important. Especially Building Information Modeling (BIM) offers a high potential for this purpose, as the integration and linking of geometric and semantic information in 3D-models for LCA and hazardous building material assessment can be done much more efficiently and intuitively. Within the scope of this work, the following three objectives were pursued (1) development of a method for combining LCA and hazardous building material assessment, (2) simplification of the results by converting them into comprehensible indicators for decision support, and (3) implementation of the method in a BIM-based digital assistant for intuitive visualization and communication. The preliminary results show a concept for combined use of LCA and hazardous building material assessment in Germany with differentiation in six use cases. A prototypical implementation as BIM-integrated digital assistant was developed for one of these use cases. For the first time, this prototype provides understandable feedback in real time of LCA and hazardous building material requirements. This research project contributes to the awareness in the context of embodied impacts and low emitting materials in buildings and advances the current digitalization potentials.
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| 9. |
- Abu-Ghaida, Haitham, et al.
(författare)
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Accounting for product recovery potential in building life cycle assessments: a disassembly network-based approach
- 2024
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Ingår i: International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. - 1614-7502 .- 0948-3349. ; In Press
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose: Existing life cycle assessment (LCA) methods for buildings often overlook the benefits of product recovery potential, whether for future reuse or repurposing. This oversight arises from the limited scope of such methods, which often ignore the complex interdependencies between building products. The present paper, backed by its supplementary Python library, introduces a method that addresses this gap, emphasizing the influence of product interdependencies and future recovery potential on environmental impact. Methods: Implementing the proposed method requires adding a phase, the recovery potential assessment, to the four phases that constitute an LCA according to the ISO 14040/14044 guidelines. Given the disassembly sequence for each product, in the first step of the recovery potential assessment, a disassembly network (DN) is created that displays structural and accessibility dependencies. By calculating the average of the disassembly potential (DP) of each structural dependency (second step) associated with that product, we obtain the DP (0.1–1) at the product level in a third step. Because there is no empirical data available to support a specific relationship between product disassembly potential and recovery potential (RP) (0–1), we employ, in a fourth step, a flexible model specification to represent scenarios of how this relationship may look like. Ultimately, for each scenario, the resulting RP is used to enable a probabilistic material flow analysis with a binary outcome, whether to be recovered or not. The resulting product-level median material flows are then used to quantify the building’s environmental impact for a given impact category in the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). The results are interpreted through an uncertainty, hotspot, and sensitivity analysis. Results and discussion: Our results show that not considering the interdependencies between building products in building LCAs results in underestimating the embodied greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by up to 28.29%. This discrepancy is primarily attributed to a failure to account for additional material flows stemming from secondary replacements owing to the interdependencies during the life cycle. When accounting for end-of-life recovery benefits, a zero-energy building (ZEB) design incorporating some DfD principles demonstrated up to 45.94% lower embodied GHG emissions than the ZEB design with low disassembly potential when assuming that recovered products will be reused. Conclusions: Our approach provides first-of-a-kind evidence that not accounting for recovery potential may significantly distort the results of an LCA for buildings. The method and its supporting code support the semi-automated calculation of the otherwise neglected potential environmental impact, thus helping to drive the transition towards a more sustainable built environment. The supporting code allows researchers to build on the proposed framework if more data on the relationship between DP and RP become available in the future. Finally, while applied to buildings in this paper, the proposed framework is adaptable to any complex product with limited modifications in the supporting code.
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| 10. |
- Andersen, Julie Swartz, et al.
(författare)
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Economic comparison of mass timber and concrete construction in the nordic region
- 2023
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Ingår i: 13th World Conference on Timber Engineering, WCTE 2023. ; 7, s. 4360-4369
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The timber sector has been growing strongly in various regions of the world. Yet, the construction industry is still far from being sustainable. One barrier is the economic concern in planning and construction works of timber constructions. This study aims to provide insights on the cost performance of Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) constructions for stakeholders to make an informed decision. It analysed the production cost of multi-story residential buildings with CLT in comparison to concrete in Norway and Sweden. The production cost data of various construction projects with either CLT or concrete was collected and analysed. Interviews with stakeholders were conducted to complement the interpretation of the cost data. The result showed that each project had its individual conditions in the economic background and requirements by client, and thus it was difficult to formulate a general tendency on the cost performance. The variability of the cost was larger and the average production cost was higher in CLT cases. Yet, there are high incentives of contractors and clients for a more sustainable alternative in general. The incentive is also reinforced by the general experience of contractors that the construction cost is better optimized as the contractor gains more experiences.
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