A Simplified Life Cycle Approach for Assessing Environmental impact of Green Building

A full life cycle assessment (LCA) is usually a time, energy, and data-intensive process requiring sophisticated methodology. Moreover, rapid growth in LCA methodological developments applied to green building has generated a large body of work that may appear to lack direction.

This research project propose that environmental impact meta-analysis of green building highlights several key, sensitive parameters, provides a better understanding of the variability in LCA results, and then proposes a methodology to establish a simplified, streamlined approach based on regressions built on these key parameters.

Green Building environmental performance can be linked to three essential components: technological (e.g., material choices), geographical (e.g., electricity mix), and LCA methodology (e.g., system boundaries).

A regression will be derived based on detailed and published LCA results. Simple Environmental performance (i.e., emissions) curves depending on average on-site configurations and lifetime are proposed as a first step toward the proposed simplified and streamlined approach.

This research will present a simplified model as an alternative to detailed LCA. The methodology is applied as a first trial to green building and could be expended to other system such as energy systems.
Finally, the proposed approach will be helpful to identify research thrusts on how to further develop LCA methodology and improve obtained results in the field of green building.

Faculty Supervisor:

Mourad Ben Amor

Student:

ALFONSO OLIVARES RIOS

Partner:

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

University:

Program:

Globalink