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Din, Asif and Brotas, Luisa (2015) The LCA impact of thermal mass on overheating in UK under future climates. In: PLEA 2015 – 31st International PLEA Conference: Architecture in (R)evolution, 9-11 September 2015, Bologna (Italy).
There is a growing awareness of the impact climate change in the built environment. Designers are often concerned with immediate impacts on buildings and this is reflected in the use of cradle to gate data in building Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). Likewise, the industry has promoted the adoption of certain materials on the grounds of their performance in Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). Under these current methods of assessment timber has a high negative rating (good performance) due to carbon sequestration. However, the use lightweight construction technologies may increase the risk of overheating in buildings which will require cooling and can result in more reliance on active systems in comparison to heavyweight constructions. Previous research did not assess the importance of thermal mass in line with new overheating criteria, defined in CIBSE TM52 (Hacker, 2008; CIBSE, 2013). In this paper a single model is analysed with dynamic simulation using climate predictions in order to compare various levels of thermal mass coupled with natural ventilation. Results are presented in terms of hours of overheating and Green House Gas (GHG) emissions by predicting when active systems are likely to be required for the different scenarios. The analysis suggests that thermal mass can reduce peak temperatures by 5oC and delay the onset of the use of air conditioning by up to 30 years. These results emphasise the importance of the evaluation of operation phase of buildings within a whole Life Cycle Analysis study.
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