Weeks 8-9 Internship Log
Initial Carbon Assessment and Embodied Emissions
I had the chance to handle a new task in weeks 8 and 9 of my internship. The objective of this exercise was to conduct and upfront carbon assessment for an aquatic and recreation center in Bacchus Marsh.
To tackle this project, I utilised the upfront carbon analysis tool in Better Building as I had already specified all the envelope materials previously, so, I just needed to tag (or label) which envelope belonged to which group of already specified materials. Honestly, I thought this would be the easy part of the task, as the Better Building already automated the quantity calculations and thus, the emissions calculation, but it was not that simple!.
I found some discrepancies in quantity take offs and emissions (kgCO2-eq) between my manual calculations using spreadsheets and databases and what the software calculated. Thus, I needed to recalculate several building envelope quantities manually, and then calculate the emissions again by referring to a separate EpiC Database 2026 with its current emission factors.
While handling this project, I also encountered another limitation of the upfront carbon tool. It appears to only calculate superstructure emissions by nominated a grid with fixed distances between each superstructure element. Not very precise. To work around this limitation I calculated manually in a spreadsheet by researching the length, cross-sectional area of each member (beam and column), density of the material, and their emission factors.
One interetsing result regarding the superstructure emissions. At first, I started with steel, and then looked at other structural materials such as concrete, glue laminated timber, and fly ash concrete. Before I ran the emission calculations, I made sure that the alternative structures could resist the same or bigger loadings as the original steel structure (so that i was comparing apples with apples). To my surprise, the result showed that steel is the most efficient in terms of embodied emissions (because of its efficient spanning capability).
At the final phase of this project, I inserted this embodied emission finding into a rule of thumb assessment to highlight ESD improvement opportunities. The assessment that I did yielded a result as can be seen below:
