The objective of this project was to quantify and compare the environmental impacts associated with alternative designs for a typical North American mid-rise office building. Two scenarios were considered; a traditional cast-in-place, reinforced concrete frame and a laminated timber hybrid design, which utilized engineered wood products (cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glulam). The boundary of the quantitative analysis was cradle-to-construction site gate and encompassed the structural support system and the building enclosure. Floor plans, elevations, material quantities, and structural loads associated with a five-storey concrete-framed building design were obtained from issued-for-construction drawings. A functionally equivalent, laminated timber hybrid design was conceived, based on Canadian Building Code requirements. Design values for locally produced CLT panels were established from in-house material testing. Primary data collected from a pilot-scale manufacturing facility was used to develop the life cycle inventory for CLT, whereas secondary sources were referenced for other construction materials. The TRACI characterization methodology was employed to translate inventory flows into impact indicators. The results indicated that the laminated timber building design offered a lower environmental impact in 10 of 11 assessment categories. The cradle-to-gate process energy was found to be nearly identical in both design scenarios (3.5 GJ/m2), whereas the cumulative embodied energy (feedstock plus process) of construction materials was estimated to be 8.2 and 4.6 GJ/m2 for the timber and concrete designs, respectively; which indicated an increased availability of readily accessible potential energy stored within the building materials of the timber alternative.
A Comparative Life Cycle Assessment Approach of Two Innovative Long Span Timber floors with its Reinforced Concrete Equivalent in an Australian Context
International Conference on Performance-based and Life-cycle Structural Engineering
Research Status
Complete
Summary
The building sector contributes 24% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. This is expected to rise by 110% by 2050. Consequently, there has been an increased demand for more sustainable building materials which can play a significant role in reducing carbon emissions. Engineered timber wall and floor panels are being seen as a viable alternative for multi-storey buildings for both strength and environmental purposes and are gaining popularity in Europe, North America and New Zealand. A number of previous Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) comparing timber and concrete mid-rise buildings have highlighted the environmental benefits of using timber, particularly during material production and on-site construction stages. Furthermore, the choice of endof-life scenario had a significant effect on the LCA outcome. The objective of this paper is to compare the environmental impacts associated with alternative designs for a long span floor in a multi-storey building in Australia. The comparison, using an LCA approach, is based on a recently built long span Timber Concrete Composite (TCC) floor in a University building in Sydney. Three design options are considered: the original design of TCC, a Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) panel, and a traditional in-situ reinforced concrete (RC) slab. The CLT and RC designs were conceived with reference to the floor plans and structural loads obtained from issued-for-construction drawings. With this evaluation, recommendations for increasing the competitiveness of CLT and TCC within the Australian market are made.
Comparative Life-Cycle Assessment of a High-Rise Mass Timber Building with an Equivalent Reinforced Concrete Alternative Using the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings
Buildings consume large amounts of materials and energy, making them one of the highest environmental impactors. Quantifying the impact of building materials can be critical to developing an effective greenhouse gas mitigation strategy. Using Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings (IE4B), this paper compares cradle-to-grave life-cycle assessment (LCA) results for a 12-story building constructed from cross-laminated timber (CLT) and a functionally equivalent reinforced concrete (RC) building. Following EN 15978 framework, environmental impacts for stages A1–A5 (product to construction), B2, B4, and B6 (use), C1–C4 (end of life), and D (beyond the building life) were evaluated in detail along resource efficiency. For material resource efficiency, total mass of the CLT building was 33.2% less than the alternative RC building. For modules A to C and not considering operational energy use (B6), LCA results show a 20.6% reduction in embodied carbon achieved for the CLT building, compared to the RC building. For modules A to D and not considering B6, the embodied carbon assessment revealed that for the CLT building, 6.57 × 105 kg CO2 eq was emitted, whereas for the equivalent RC building, 2.16 × 106 kg CO2 eq was emitted, and emissions from CLT building was 70% lower than that from RC building. Additionally, 1.84 × 106 kg of CO2 eq was stored in the wood material used in the CLT building during its lifetime. Building material selection should be considered for the urgent need to reduce global climate change impacts.
This study compares the life cycle environmental impacts of two multilevel residential buildings built in Melbourne, Australia. The study was commissioned by Australand and funded by Forest and Wood Products Australia (FWPA).
The first building considered, the ‘Study Building’, incorporated an innovative light weight building approach utilising a stick-built timber frame and a ‘cassette floor’ building system. The second building, the ‘Reference Building’ utilised a more typical building approach, incorporating precast concrete panels and suspended concrete slab floors (Table 1).
The primary goal of the study was to compare the potential environmental impacts of the above buildings across their respective life cycles.
The study employed the LCA methodology described by the ISO14044 standard to undertake the comparison of the buildings. The analysis addressed a building life cycle scope which was prescribed by GBCA (GBCA 2014), which in turn based the boundary definition on the EN15978 standard, as shown in Figure 1. Although EN15978 was used to define the scope of the LCA, the study is not intended to be fully compliant with the standard.
A Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Two Multistory Residential Buildings: Cross-Laminated Timber Vs. Concrete Slab and Column with Light Gauge Steel Walls
This study provides a comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of a 4060 m2, 4-storey cross laminated timber (CLT) apartment building located in Quebec City, Canada and an equivalently designed building consisting of reinforced concrete slabs and columns with light gauge steel studded walls (CSSW). The emergence of CLT as a structural material that can be used in mid-rise building structures combined with limited work investigating the environmental performance of CLT in building applications provides the motivation for this comparative study.
Mass timber building materials such as cross-laminated timber (CLT) have captured attention in mid- to high-rise building designs because of their potential environmental benefits. The recently updated multistory building code also enables greater utilization of these wood building materials. The cost-effectiveness of mass timber buildings is also undergoing substantial analysis. Given the relatively new presence of CLT in United States, high front-end construction costs are expected. This study presents the life-cycle cost (LCC) for a 12-story, 8,360-m2 mass timber building to be built in Portland, Oregon. The goal was to assess its total life-cycle cost (TLCC) relative to a functionally equivalent reinforced-concrete building design using our in-house-developed LCC tool. Based on commercial construction cost data from the RSMeans database, a mass timber building design is estimated to have 26 percent higher front-end costs than its concrete alternative. Front-end construction costs dominated the TLCC for both buildings. However, a decrease of 2.4 percent TLCC relative to concrete building was observed because of the estimated longer lifespan and higher end-of-life salvage value for the mass timber building. The end-of-life savings from demolition cost or salvage values in mass timber building could offset some initial construction costs. There are minimal historical construction cost data and lack of operational cost data for mass timber buildings; therefore, more studies and data are needed to make the generalization of these results. However, a solid methodology for mass timber building LCC was developed and applied to demonstrate several cost scenarios for mass timber building benefits or disadvantages.
Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), which is made by laminating dimension lumber at right angles, is an innovative high-performance building material that offers many positive attributes including renewability, high structural stability, storage of carbon during the building life, good fire resistance, possibility of material recycling and reuse. It is conceptually a sustainable and cost effective structural timber solution that can compete with concrete in non-residential and multi-family mid-rise building market. Therefore, there is a need to understand and quantify the environmental attribute of this building system in the context of North American resources, manufacturing technology, energy constraints, building types, and construction practice. This study is to compare energy consumption of two building designs using different materials, i.e. CLT and concrete.
The designs were based on a five-storey office building, Discovery Place-Building 12, which is located in Burnaby, British Columbia, at 4200 Canada Way. The existing building was built with reinforced concrete. Embodied energy was calculated based on the total amount of material required for each of the building systems. Operational energy was calculated using eQUEST, an energy usage modeling software tool. The environmental impacts of the buildings were evaluated by comparing the total energy consumption through the building life.
CLT has lower non-renewable energy consumption compared to concrete in terms of material acquisition, manufacturing and transportation. Previous studies shew that operational energy accounts for the main amount of total energy use in buildings during their service life. Hence, the importance of embodied energy increases by reducing operational energy consumption. CLT has lower embodied energy compared to concrete. Therefore, the advantage of using CLT as a construction material is becoming greater by designing low energy or passive buildings.
International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference
Research Status
Complete
Notes
August 4–7, 2013, Portland, Oregon, USA
Summary
As sustainable building design practices become more prevalent in today’s construction market, designers are looking to alternative materials for novel design strategies. This paper presents a case study comparing the sustainability performance of cross laminated timber (CLT) and reinforced concrete. A comparative sustainability assessment of cross laminated timber and concrete, considering economic, environmental, and social aspects was performed. Environmental impact is measured in terms of CO2 equivalent, economic impact is measured with total sector cost (including sector interdependencies), and qualitative metrics were considered for social impact. In order to conduct an accurate performance comparison, a functional unit of building facade volume was chosen for each product. For this paper, several end-of-life strategies were modeled for CLT and concrete facades. To understand environmental, economic, and social impact, three different scenarios were analyzed to compare performance of both CLT and concrete, including cradle to gate product manufacturing, manufacturing with landfill end-of-life, and manufacturing with recycling end-of-life. Environmental LCA was modeled using GaBi 5.0 Education Edition, which includes its own database for elements including materials, processes, and transportation. To compare the economic impact, Carnegie Mellon’s EIO-LCA online tool is used. Finally, social life cycle impact was considered by identifying process attributes of both products that affect the social domain. Based on this analysis, the use of CLT has a significantly lower environmental impact than concrete, however there are additional costs.
A Comparison of the Energy Saving and Carbon Reduction Performance between Reinforced Concrete and Cross-Laminated Timber Structures in Residential Buildings in the Severe Cold Region of China
This paper aims to investigate the energy saving and carbon reduction performance of cross-laminated timber residential buildings in the severe cold region of China through a computational simulation approach. The authors selected Harbin as the simulation environment, designed reference residential buildings with different storeys which were constructed using reinforced concrete (RC) and cross-laminated timber (CLT) systems, then simulated the energy performance using the commercial software IESTM and finally made comparisions between the RC and CLT buildings. The results show that the estimated energy consumption and carbon emissions for CLT buildings are 9.9% and 13.2% lower than those of RC buildings in view of life-cycle assessment. This indicates that the CLT construction system has good potential for energy saving when compared to RC in the severe cold region of China. The energy efficiency of residential buildings is closely related to the height for both RC and CLT buildings. In spite of the higher cost of materials for high-rise buildings, both RC and CLT tall residential buildings have better energy efficiency than low-rise and mid-rise buildings in the severe cold region of China.
The application of cross-laminated timber (CLT) as floor panels is limited by excessive deflection and vibration. A composite system combining CLT and ultra high-performance fibre-reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) was developed to extend span limits. Push-off tests were conducted on different connectors, and a glued-in rod connector was chosen and further refined for the proposed system. Static bending tests and free vibration tests were conducted on bare CLT panels and two composite specimens. By comparing the results, it is concluded that the proposed system considerably extend the span limits of CLT panels.
