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Global carbon viability of glass technologies: Life-cycle assessment of standard, advanced and water-filled glass (WFG) building envelopes

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posted on 2024-10-01, 15:27 authored by Matyas GutaiMatyas Gutai, Brandon MokBrandon Mok, Giulio Cavana, Abolfazl Ganji Kheybari
The construction sector is responsible for around 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with building envelopes playing a significant role in this carbon footprint. This is particularly relevant for building facades with large window-to-wall ratios (WWR), because higher proportions of glass increase both operational and embodied carbon. In light of the contemporary demand for such glazed envelopes, there is an emerging legislative trend that measures not only operational carbon, but also embodied via utilizing life-cycle assessment tools (LCA). To this effect, there is a great demand for techniques that can effectively lower the former carbon without increasing the latter. To contribute to this effort, this paper presents a whole LCA across seven cities for standard and advanced glazing solutions, including Water-Filled Glass (WFG). WFG is a novel technology that utilizes water in the cavity of insulated glass units (IGU), to improve thermal comfort, energy and acoustic performance of buildings. The paper utilizes energy simulation modelling through TRNSYS, and provides a comparative analysis of different glazing techniques. The significance of this paper is that a comprehensive cradle-to-grave LCA analysis of standard and advanced glass techniques is presented here for the first time, across all major Köppen-Geiger climates. The results show that WFG presents considerable carbon savings against all other options e.g., 31–53% compared to double glass, underlining the possibility of reducing operational and embodied carbon simultaneously. A second novel outcome of the paper is introducing the Glass Viability Index (GVI) for the first time, which presents the ‘carbon payback’ period required to offset an embodied carbon increase with operational savings. This is because the short lifespan of glass makes embodied carbon a large driver in LCA, and as such the prioritisation of operational carbon when selecting a technique can lead to a unsustainable practice.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

Applied Energy

Volume

367

Issue

2024

Publisher

Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Acceptance date

2024-04-17

Publication date

2024-05-08

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

0306-2619

eISSN

1872-9118

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Matyas Gutai. Deposit date: 27 September 2024

Article number

123281

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