The research group Sustainable building works with concepts, tools and strategies to enhance the sustainability performance of construction materials, building products, buildings as well as entire cities. The research is related to ecological and economic life cycle assessment of construction materials, buildings and infrastructures, sustainability assessment tools for buildings, social-cultural and climate adapted design concepts as well as energy and material resource based building stock modeling and its visualization.
The aim of the course is to equip students with the necessary skills and abilities to carry out design for sustainable building, integrating environmental, functional, technical, and aesthetical qualities in a design concept. Furthermore, they shall be able to cooperate over professional boundaries in the design processes. They are also expected to be able to formulate and communicate their main ideas and goals orally and in written form.
The Carbon Resource Energy and Adaption Toolbox Europe (CREATE), is a comprehensive modelling and data toolbox that can overcome problems such as - How, and at which costs can ambitious climate change mitigation goals be reached? How can urban planning be developed while simultaneously tackling climate change? How can the long-term economic and environmental performance of the building stock be optimized? How to plan electricity, gas, and thermal networks to suit future energy demand and the existing urban topology?
The DecarbonAIte project aims to extract data on building characteristics from public databases. Use this information to elaborate and reinforce urban digital twin models. Finally, through this platform, to propose optimal renovation measures. The system to be implemented targets various stakeholders, from building owners to policy makers.
To plan, build or renovate cities, engineers and decision makers need tools and workflows that are compartmentalized and work ad-hoc without correlating different parameters. To tackle these problems and enable environmental assessment and policy analysis, this project aims to create an urban modeling planning tool for the energy demand of buildings and the invisible environmental factors of noise and wind. The project will . * provide a basis for scenario analysis of any urban area in Sweden. * use AI/ML to enrich existing models . * make the toolsets readily available, and. * enable improved visualization and communication or results.
Abstract In the early stages of a building project, there is low quantity and quality of data regarding building materials while the ability to influence the environmental impact is high. Easy ways of assessing environmental impact of materials in these stages can make a big difference and shift buildings’ contribution to global warming towards a more sustainable track.
SEsam : Sharing Economy sustainability assessment method to support the implementation of sharing economy initiatives at neighbourhood level. The aim of this project is to develop and apply a systemic method that quantifies the sustainability benefits of implementing different sharing economy initiatives in neighborhoods in cities.
Digital tools for performance-assessment are commonly used to shorten the feedback loop in testing designs for buildings and neighbourhoods. However, these tools do not extend to the social dimension in the same way as the economic and environmental dimensions. The aim of this project is to develop a theoretical understanding of social sustainability at the neighbourhood planning level and propose a model for the development of digital tools.
The aim of the course is to deepen the skills in using simulation tools for the integrated performance optimisation of an architectural design project. Performance criteria can include energy demand, daylight, thermal comfort, embodied carbon, amongst others. The students can choose to optimise an own design of a building or urban project that they developed in a previous course, or they can use the case study provided by the teachers. The design optimisation process will be based on and driven by knowledge gained using the simulation tools.
The project aims to develop advanced indoor environmental quality IEQ in sustainable office buildings promoting occupant comfort, health, and productivity by identifying key factors and revealing causal relations from evidence-based studies. A national dataset will be aggregated from the office buildings in Sweden by physical measurement and subjective survey.
Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) offers renewable energy to be generated on-site and prevents additional sealing of natural ground, potentially replacing traditional building elements. The objective of the Powering the City module is to develop a holistic, multi-scale and interdisciplinary approach for assessing large scale deployment of BIPV in urban contexts under different climatic, socio-economic and architectural / urban conditions. The team will use Zurich and Singapore as exemplary and complementary case studies.
This project aims at the full utilization of the benefits offered by stainless steel to have sustainable and “maintenance-free” road bridges which have competitive investment costs to that of their traditional carbon steel counterparts. It is believed that by the use of bridge girders with corrugated webs and stainless steel reinforcement and optimization of the material usage and production costs, a considerable reduction in the investment costs of a stainless-steel solution is attainable.