Paper Conference

2022 Building Performance Analysis Conference and SimBuild co-organized by ASHRAE and IBPSA-USA

     

Heuristic Urban-scale Life Cycle Assessment of Districts to Determine Their Carbon Footprints

Maximilian Schildt, Johannes Cuypers, Avichal Malhotra, Maxim Shamovich, Jérôme Frisch, Christoph Van Treeck

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26868/25746308.2022.C035
Abstract: The decarbonisation goals for the building sector require the large-scale determination of buildings' carbon footprints. For this purpose, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is generally used as a methodology to determine the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of individual buildings and districts. LCA tends to be granular, requiring a large amount of data and time. This work introduces Teco, an enrichment framework for heuristically determining the carbon footprints of districts using City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) Level of Detail (LoD) 2 building models along with a few manual input parameters. In this paper, a use case demonstrates the necessity for refinements of available archetypes and user input for an accurate calculation of the GWP. Key Innovations • An extended data framework for Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) based on data in City Geography Markup Language (CityGML), combining materials with physical properties relevant for Building Energy Performance Simulation (BEPS) and Global Warming Potential (GWP) determination. • Heuristic approach to determine district-scale Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) with fewer input parameters. • Developed framework Teco, prospectively, provides an efficient method for district Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) by providing a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and an input functionality of publicly available CityGML building models.
Pages: 309 - 317
Paper:
simbuild2022_C035