Controlling Environmental Impact of Building through Assessment and Improvement of Construction Embodied Energy

Authors
Asghar Mohammad Moradi 1
Seyyed Bagher Hosseini 2
Seyyed Bagher Hosseini 2
Hamid Yazdani 3
1 Professor, School of Architecture, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran.
2 Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Iran University of Science and Technology.
3 Ph.D. Student, School of Architecture, Iran University of Science and Technology.
Abstract
In the last decade, there has been more attention towards the assessment and improvement of construction phase embodied energy. In addition to buildings maintenance energy, large amounts of energies are consumed in construction process which is called embodied energy. This research results from recording all types of energies used in construction phase and presenting a numerical calculation method to assess the embodied energy of area unit and also decreasing this energy to its lowest possible limit. In order to achieve the minimum embodied energy, three energy consuming phases are calculated for 1400 square meter case study; which are material embodied energy, transportation energy and erection and on-site energy. Deviation of total embodied energy for the area shows 795.14 GJ/M2 as embodied energy. This digit is a reliable benchmark for comparing these three energy consuming phases and also comparing this construction system with other ones. Total embodied energy it the result of all three parts. But analysis of them shows that it's necessary to substitute some materials with more optimized ones. The result of this substitution decreased the embodied energy to 12.75 GJ/M2 and which is about 1.6% of the first measured embodied energy.

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