Sustainable design of reinforced concrete structures through embodied energy optimization

Estimation and Minimization of Embodied Carbon of Buildings: A Review

“…Optimal design, and thus avoiding overdesign, may result in considerable reductions in the total quantity of materials and, thus, the embodied carbon of the structure. Avoiding overdesign has been advocated for decades as one of the main principles of engineering design to minimize the costs, weight and material use of structures [21]. It should be noted that minimizing the material usage, and thus the embodied carbon, should be performed while maintaining the ability of the structure to meet all other technical and performance requirements [21].…”

“…Avoiding overdesign has been advocated for decades as one of the main principles of engineering design to minimize the costs, weight and material use of structures [21]. It should be noted that minimizing the material usage, and thus the embodied carbon, should be performed while maintaining the ability of the structure to meet all other technical and performance requirements [21]. Yeo and Gabbi showed that the structural optimization of a beam cross section can result in a decrease in the embodied energy of the beam on the order of 10% at the expense of about a 5% increase in the cost relative to a cost-optimized member.…”

“…The reduced share of operating carbon and consequent increase in the relative contribution of embodied carbon to life cycle carbon has resulted in a clear shift in the focus of research towards investigating strategies to reduce the embodied carbon of buildings [7,17,18]. These common strategies include the use of low-carbon materials, material reuse, recycling and minimization, selection of optimal structural system and structural optimization, and optimization of construction operations [19][20][21][22]. However, while considerable effort has been put into developing strategies for reducing the embodied carbon of buildings, as well as models for quantifying the effectiveness of such strategies through estimating the resulting The relative contribution of embodied carbon and operating carbon to the total life cycle carbon of buildings may vary considerably depending on the type and function of the building [8], as well as factors including location, climate, fuel type used, orientation of building, massing of building, etc.…”

Contribution to sustainable seismic design of reinforced concrete members through embodied CO2 emissions optimization

“…Generally, the DCH solutions demonstrated the highest ms/Vc ratios, for a given Msd value, followed by the DCM optimum designs. To investigate the influence of the unit environmental impacts of concrete and reinforcing steel on the properties of the optimum solutions, the ratio R is used in this study [5]. R is defined as the ratio of the CO2 footprint of 100kg of reinforcement steel to the CO2 footprint of concrete per m 3 .…”

“…A significant number of research studies focus on optimum design of RC structures for minimum environmental impacts. Yeo & Gabbai [5] investigated optimum designs of RC beams for minimum embodied energy. They concluded that optimization for embodied energy results in decreases on the order of 10% in embodied energy at the expense of an increase on the order of 5% in cost relative to cost-optimized members.…”