Research
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Unsustainable energy and material consumption, waste production, and greenhouse gas emissions are some of today’s most pressing global concerns. To address these concerns, we must now design sustainable facilities that, for example, passively generate power, reuse waste, and are carbon neutral. Furthermore, we recognize that the negative impacts of climate change and other environmental hazards are disproportionately borne by those who are already marginalized, so mitigating environmental health hazards and decarbonizing the built environment constitute urgent environmental justice issues.
To support the realization of sustainable buildings and infrastructure, we develop fundamental engineering design concepts, models, and tools.
Our research can be summarized visually via the Sustainable Integrated Materials, Structures, Systems (SIMSS) framework developed by Professor Lepech (Figure 1). We consider the triple bottom line impacts of facilities by integrating environmental, social, and economic sustainability indicators. We work across length scales, including the material scale, the building scale, and the system scales. Specifically, we use quantitative sustainability assessment (such as probabilistic life cycle analysis) and service life modeling. We develop engineering design concepts, models, and tools that connect multi-scale design parameters (e.g. material microstructure, construction processes, and system maintenance) to sustainability indicators. The goal of this work is to strengthen the feedback loop improving sustainable design and management strategies for buildings and infrastructure. Our work targets the spectrum of life cycle phases of constructed facilities, including early design, project engineering, construction, operation, maintenance, and end-of-life.
Our group applies the SIMSS framework through:
- developing quantitative sustainability assessment methods that enable practitioners to quickly measure sustainability indicators (such as carbon footprint)
- creating multi-scale engineering tools that integrate with sustainability assessment and facilitate setting and meeting sustainability targets throughout the life cycle of buildings and infrastructure