Smart Living Lunch

Join our next Smart Living Lunch online on February 23th 2021 from 11:00 to 12:00.
Nazanin Rezaei Oghazi (ENERGY, HEIA-FR) will present the CarbonLight project : an exploration-based life cycle assessment of daylighting strategies.
Zoom link upon registration.

The impact of daylighting strategies on a building’s carbon emissions have so far been assessed mostly based on the building’s use phase and their resulting operational benefits, overlooking embodied carbon emissions of material production, construction, maintenance and end of life. Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) is likely to shift the focus of daylighting from operational carbon impacts to the life cycle carbon impacts and effectively reduce the environmental impacts of future buildings, if applied at early stages of design.

Applying Design Space Exploration (DSE) methods for LCA, which involves parametric assessments combined with data visualization, has already demonstrated a great potential to mitigate carbon emissions of future buildings by supporting the decision process in assessing embodied impacts of design alternatives. However, there is no methodological framework yet to implement DSE for both daylight and carbon footprint performance objectives, which is the purpose of CarbonLight project. By combining sensitivity analysis and target cascading techniques, a first methodological framework is proposed, that is then tested on a case study, i.e. Solar Decathlon Europe 2021.

This proposed method allows to uncover relationships between daylight targets and induced carbon emissions of influential building components, rank design parameters based on their influence on daylight access and life cycle carbon emissions through sensitivity analysis and allocate the carbon budget to each façade component thanks to target cascading techniques.