Embodied Energy Assessment of Building Structural Systems Using Building Information Modeling

Buildings contribute to socio-economic development of the human societies, but they are also among the main consumers of energy and contributors to the greenhouse gas emissions during their lifecycles. The construction phase of building projects is typically recognized for substantial use of natural resources and energy consumption. Steel, reinforced concrete, and engineered wood are the most common structural materials used in the Canadian construction industry. The environmental impact of the structural material is typically overlooked mainly because the industry lacks a documented assessment framework. There were some research efforts that studied energy consumption of the construction phase of building projects, but they mostly used a large number of complex calculations to estimate the consumed energy and emission. This paper introduces an innovative framework for the environmental assessment of the construction of building structural systems. This method uses a building information modelling platform to automate data extraction and then links them to certain databases to calculate embodied energy and emissions. This framework considers production, transportation, wastage, and installation/construction processes to calculate the impacts. An experimental study was carried out on two residential buildings, with a similar layout but different structural systems, to evaluate the practical use of this framework. It demonstrated a straightforward method to estimate embodied energy and emission of the structural system using the BIM model of the design. Similar to other studies, the manufacturing phase has the greatest impact on the embodied energy and emission of a building structure.