Life Cycle Energy Analysis Software Tool for Sustainable Building Design

摘要

Sustainable construction often refers to construction activities whose negative impacts are minimized and positive impacts maximized so as to achieve a balance in terms of energy, environmental, economic and social performances. Such activities may include construction of new buildings; refurbishment of existing buildings; restoration of historical buildings; use of non-depletive and recycled materials; reduction of construction and demolition waste; reduction of energy use; and provision of healthy, safe and pleasant built facilities. In 2005 Electrical and Mechanical Services Department (EMSD) completed a study on Life Cycle Energy Analysis (LCEA) of Building Construction and developed a user-friendly software tool to assess the sustainability of building designs. The LCEA tool developed facilitates quantitative analysis of Energy Use, Life Cycle Costing and Life Cycle Assessment of commercial and institutional buildings in comparing and selecting sustainable design options. The tool contains a database on environmental impacts and costs for the dominants range of building materials and system components that is established from survey of 28 recently completed commercial and government buildings in Hong Kong. The life cycle environmental impacts given in the output of the LCEA software consists of abiotic depletion; global warming; ozone depletion; human toxicity; fresh water ecotoxicity; fresh water ecotoxicity; marine aquatic ecotoxicity; terrestrial ecotoxicity; photochemical smog; acidification; eutrophication; energy consumption and solid waste. In 2006 EMSD collaborated with another government agency to conduct a trial use of the LCEA tool in quantitative assessment on the Environmental Impacts, Energy Use and Life Cycle Costing performances of two completed projects namely, a municipal facility and a state-of-the-art intelligent office building. The result shown that the material database is sufficient to model the building design, whereas a comprehensive output is provided for designers to identify design improvement. It is also observed that the manpower requirement of using the LCEA software tool on real building constitute only a small portion of the design workload and would not bring excessive workload to the design team. Government projects in the design stage are now nominated to apply the software tool. It is envisaged that with the aid of using the software tool, the designer could examine the energy, cost and environmental impacts of each stage of the project and identify the most effective and sustainable design option.