Assessment on Embodied Energy of Non-Load Bearing Walls for Office Buildings

Abstract

Two important factors that have been put in the limelight in the current age are environmental concerns and sustainable future. The building sector has emerged as an important player in this matter due to their contribution into the large share of resources and energy consumption as well as harmful greenhouse gas emission. This paper discusses the percentage of embodied energy (EE) in two common building wall materials in Malaysia: steel and concrete. Concrete is used in concrete non-load bearing walls and steel is used to manufacture curtain walls. Although there are more materials used in the selected case studies, steel and concrete possess the high amount of embodied energy. Thus, the concrete wall and curtain wall in the lifecycle analysis (LCA) pre-use phase in high-rise office buildings in Malaysia are considered in this research. GaBi software is used to evaluate and calculate embodied energy in the case studies. The functional unit for this LCA study is determined as one cubic meter of concrete non-load bearing wall and curtain wall. In order to determine the components included in the analysis, input-output flowcharts are created for each process. The comparison of these walls shows that curtain wall has more embodied energy than concrete. The highest amount of embodied energy in curtain wall construction for case B is 4873.89 MJ, and for the case A is 4851.09 MJ approximately. The amount of EE in the concrete non-load bearing wall for both case studies are the lowest amount, with 278.85 MJ for case A and 280.66 MJ for case B. Results also show that the manufacturing of materials is the biggest contribution to the amount of EE at more than 50%, whereas transportation is between 1.83% and 3.77% only.