A team of Pittsburgh engineers and architects, led by University of Pittsburgh engineering professor Melissa Bilec, will be researching methodologies that can be applied to conducting Life Cycle Assessment of newly constructed buildings. The work will be funded by a $2 million grant recently won from the National Science Foundation. The research team is made up of three engineering professors from Pitt, two architecture professors from Carnegie Mellon University, and involves collaboration with other organizations, including the Green Building Alliance.
To do that, the team will use a three-step process:
Survey architects, engineers, construction companies and others in the field to determine how life cycle assessment can be used
- Develop criteria that those in the field can use to determine the LCA of a building, as well as the LCA of the products and materials in the building.
- Create a digital platform that will estimate the environmental footprint of construction decisions, such as which type of building material to use, or which brand of linoleum, or what type of lighting to use.
- Ultimately, what the team creates could be plugged into the building information modeling that is now used in the field to understand how a building is constructed and used.
The information that Dr. Bilec’s team hopes to create could provide LCA impact for every conceivable type of a given construction product a designer might be thinking about using. That would be a huge change because while LCA has been used for years, it has been focused on the products and materials that are used in a building, not how the building is then used. Ultimately what the team creates could be plugged into Building Information Modeling (BIM) systems that are currently used in the design and construction phase of a building.
The U.S. Green Building Council, which wrote letters in support of Dr. Bilec’s grant application, also will watch the results for any help the project will be to making LEED certification standards more thorough.