Building Envelope Improvement: Operational and Embodied Carbon Emission Reduction for Academic Buildings

Abstract

Building Climate impact includes CO2 emissions from operational energy use and embodied carbon emissions. High-performance building envelopes can significantly lower energy reduce HVAC loads by preventing heat transfer through the building envelope. Retrofitting building envelope components can lead to significant energy and carbon reduction. However, energy efficiency solutions often reduce operational energy demand by increasing the buildings' embodied energy, and greenhouse gas emissions involve increased material use. Therefore, this research is to evaluate the impact of energy retrofits on life cycle GHGs emissions across different envelope retrofit solutions including wall insulations, roof insulations, high performance glazing, and shading panels, which can offer a dual benefit to both aimed at reducing operational carbon emissions by lowering embodied carbon increasement for an academic building case study.  This study performed a method integrating Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) to extract the construction materials data to OneClickLCA database, utilizing in the plugin mainly on the service life cycle building for 60 years. After model calibration, the calibrated models were used for retrofit analysis to evaluate the energy reduction potential, which was performed using a calibrated model by EnergyPlus. The results evaluated 73 different configurations and classified each strategy using cellulose insulation, green reflective coated glass, and horizontal aluminum shading panels with a 90-cm-projection can achieve energy reduction up to 4.4%, 4.37%, and 2.67%, and have the lowest embodied emissions at 0.90%, 4.82% and 2.16%, respectively.