Sustainable building Research Group
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.
Latest News
CREATE
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?
Users’ impact on domestic energy consumption
The project aims to improve the understanding of the impact of users on domestic energy use by conducting a pilot study in the HSB Living Lab, and develop a methodology to study the impact of occupants’ physiological and behavioural responses on their home’s energy use.
DecarbonAIte
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.
Holistic life cycle performance optimization
The main goal of the project is to mainstream holistic life cycle performance optimisation in early design stages of buildings to save energy and greenhouse gas emissions. All performance optimisation will follow a life cycle perspective.
Urban modelling and planning tool for energy and invisible environmental factors using AI methods
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.
Architectural design variable assessment in multi-objective life cycle optimisation
This project aims to identify the important architectural design variables in early design stage for life cycle optimisation by interacting with stakeholders who have major influence in early design stage.
Optimized early-stage life cycle assessment of buildings -Developing a tool enabling early-stage parametric life cycle assessment
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.
REDAP
The aim of this project is to develop a Regional Energy Demand Analysis Portal (REDAP) together with the partner countries Austria, Ireland and Sweden based on local and regional Need-owners demands.
WELL Neighbourhood
This project is about developing digital tools to promote social sustainability in neighbourhood design
ARK415 - Design and performance optimization for buildings
The aim of the course is to deepen the skills in the use of advanced simulation tools for the integrated performance optimisation of an architectural design project. A design problem is provided in the form of a building case study each year. These are usually buildings for work and activities, such as offices and other places for work, where specific requirements like generality, flexibility, optimization systems for climate and energy can be formulated. The architectural design will be based on and driven by knowledge gained using simulation tools early in the design process.
BOM250 - Life cycle engineering
The master course aims to provide in-depth knowledge on the concepts of Life Cycle Engineering and sustainable design in the built environment.
Digitalisation of social sustainability in neighbourhood design
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.
Sample of completed thesis
This project is about developing digital tools to promote social sustainability in neighbourhood design
Sample of Offered thesis
This project is about developing digital tools to promote social sustainability in neighbourhood design
SEsam
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.
Energy performance and occupant satisfaction in green-certified office buildings
The project aims to reflect on green building design and operation and occupant satisfaction and experience in the “real world”; explore the potential causes from the detailed design parameters, necessary conditions in the building certification scheme and building operation and control.
Occupant well-being and productivity in sustainable office buildings
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.
Powering the City
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.
Sustainable Bridges
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.
Twinable
A multiscale design interaction and visualization approach using mixed realities