Termiske simulerings metoder kombineret med LCA metoder

Description

This paper describes recent efforts made by the Danish Building Research Institute regarding the integration of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method into a whole building hygro-thermal simulation tool. The motivation for the work is that the increased requirements to the energy performance of buildings (as expressed in EU Directive 2002/91/EC), may in the future be supplemented by requirements to the environmental impact of buildings. This can be seen by the fact that EU recently has given CEN mandate to prepare standards for environmental assessment of buildings. Combining thermal simulation methods with LCA methods enables designers to assess both sets of requirements in one operation, without the need to input redundant data in different tools. Another advantage of combining the two methods is that it makes it possible to compare the environmental impact of the building during the construction and operational phases. This is of particular interest for low-energy buildings, which often requires a relatively high consumption of resources during the construction, but has a lower consumption of resources during operation. The result of this is that the environmental impact during the two phases can easily be of the same order of magnitude. The paper describes how the LCA method is integrated into the thermal simulation tool, and the prerequisites for using them. A number of test-cases are used for illustrating how the combination of the two methods can be used for generating design alternatives with high performance regarding energy as well as environmental impact.