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UNDERSTANDING THE EMBEDDED CARBON CHALLENGES OF BUILDING SERVICE SYSTEMS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2021

Maria Hein ,
Darren Anthony Jones  and
Claudia Margot Eckert
Maria Hein
Affiliation:
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Darren Anthony Jones*
Affiliation:
The Open University
Claudia Margot Eckert
Affiliation:
The Open University
*
Jones, Darren, The Open University, STEM-EI, United Kingdom, darren.a.jones@open.ac.uk

Abstract

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Energy consumed in buildings is a main contributor to CO2 emissions, there is therefore a need to improve the energy performance of buildings, particularly commercial buildings whereby building service systems are often substantially over-designed due to the application of excess margins during the design process.

The cooling system of an NHS Hospital was studied and modelled in order to identify if the system was overdesigned, and to quantify the oversizing impact on the system operational and embodied carbon footprints. Looking at the operational energy use and environmental performance of the current system as well as an alternative optimised system through appropriate modelling and calculation, the case study results indicate significant environmental impacts are caused by the oversizing of cooling system.

The study also established that it is currently more difficult to obtain an estimate of the embodied carbon footprint of building service systems. It is therefore the responsibility of the machine builders to provide information and data relating to the embodied carbon of their products, which in the longer term, this is likely to become a standard industry requirement.

Keywords

Decision makingCase studyRequirementsDesign MarginsOverdesign
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 1: ICED21 , August 2021 , pp. 3279 - 3288
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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