Q2. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Sustainability-led design: feasibility of incorporating whole-life cycle energy assessment into bim for refurbishment projects" ?
Growing climate change challenges and increasingly strict sustainability standards have led to a significant growth in the need for building refurbishment projects which are essentially focused on retrofitting in order to make them low carbon, energy efficient and environmentally friendly. The Waste and Resources Action Programme ( WRAP ) suggested that Building Information Modelling ( BIM ) should be used to achieve sustainability requirements during refurbishment projects as a correspondence to the National Audit Office ( NAO ) sustainability report. The potential for using BIM in refurbishment projects specifically for achieving and managing sustainability requirements has not been yet critically reviewed or put into practice. This paper focuses on the use of BIM sustainability design tools in refurbishment projects, to achieve energy efficient buildings and achieve sustainability criteria for refurbishing non-domestic buildings. The research also reviews the practicality of the existing sustainability decisionsupport tools that are currently used to assist with achieving environmental scheme certifications such as BREEAM and LEED for refurbishment projects.
Q3. What are the main features of the BIM analysis tools?
BIM analysis tools provide building thermal simulation, including dynamic analysis of energy performance calculating thermal loads and thermal consumption of a building.
Q4. How many buildings will require refurbishment by 2050?
In order to meet UK national carbon emission targets, approximately 28 million building in the UK will require refurbishment by 2050.
Q5. What is the role of the construction sector in the environmental debate?
The construction sector has a have a major impact on the environment - during the construction of new buildings or the refurbishment of existing buildings, affecting the global climate by using a considerable number of resources, materials and energy and contributing to a large amount of carbon and energy emissions.
Q6. What is the main reason why buildings should be designed and materials selected to balance the whole life cycle?
Buildings should be designed and materials selected to balance the whole life cycle of energy with factors such as climate, availability of materials and transport costs.
Q7. What are the main issues that are assessed in this research?
since these issues are associated with sustainability, BIM sustainability design tools are assessed in this research to ensure that the project complies with relevant environmental assessment schemes such as BREEAM and LEED.
Q8. What is the main reason why the current process of sustainable design iterations in refurbishment projects?
As the current process of sustainable design iterations in refurbishment projects is progressing from traditional CAD systems towards the adoption of BIM, different strategies of integral refurbishment were developed and generated a number of effective environmental assessment methods and tools.
Q9. What is the role of the construction industry in the development of BIM?
The construction industry is in the early stages of a major technological advance in the shape of Building Information Modelling (BIM), which seeks to integrate all flows of information associated with a construction project and improve their accessibility by all project stakeholders (Sacks et al., 2018).
Q10. What is the role of the buildings sector in the construction industry?
World wide, the buildings sector is responsible for significant resource consumption during construction, operation and demolition.
Q11. What is the main reliable source of data for embodied energy?
In the UK there is a number of sources for calculated embodied energy data, ICE database is known as the main reliable and open-source of data, structured into 34 main material groups with over 1700 records on embodied energy (carbon).
Q12. How many points did Kamaruzaman et al. (2016) grade the life cycle energy?
According to Kamaruzaman et al. (2016), the technical manuals associated with refurbishment projects for BREEAM and LEED both grade the life cycle energy of materials as the highest points contribution to the overall sustainability criteria with nearly 18% of the overall BREEAM rating across the Pollution, Materials, Energy and Waste categories, and 14% of LEED overall rating criteria.
Q13. What is the main reason why sustainability is increasingly recognised by many industries?
sustainability is increasingly recognised by many industries such as manufacturing and construction, mainly due to the impact that these industries have on sustainability (Glasser et al., 2005).
Q14. What is the BRE's claim that they have considered the inclusion of life cycle energy impacts?
In the BREEAM UK Refurbishment and Fit-out 2014 manual (BRE, 2014), the BRE claims to have considered the inclusion of life cycle energy impacts within their assessment criteria by incorporating the Green Guide specification to analyse the life cycle energy impacts of materials.
Q15. What technologies are available to enable existing materials to be characterised prior to refurbishment?
In addition, technologies exist which enable existing materials to be characterised prior to refurbishment, for example hyperspectral analysis.
Q16. What is the main reason why the process of transforming existing data into a verified BIM?
The process of transforming existing data into a verified BIM model is very labour intensive (redraw), riddled with human error and very expensive (Jung et al., 2014).
Q17. Why do designers rarely use BIM energy performance analyses?
designers rarely use BIM energy performance analyses due to the skills required in preparing the energy models and to interpret the outputs.
Q18. What are the disadvantages of using a simulation tool?
The first of these disadvantages is that simulation input data and results must be subjected to careful use to avoid errors in simulation.
Q19. What is the main source of shaping sustainable decisions in projects?
Errors in definitions and calculations can have great impacts on the environment, as these definitions are becoming the main source of shaping sustainable decisions in projects.
Q20. How do you calculate the energy impacts of a building?
in order to correctly evaluate the overall environmental impacts of a building, all the life cycle stages should be included in order to calculate energy impacts from cradle to grave as specified by PAS2050:2010 and as demonstrated in Figure 2.
Q21. What is the way to calculate embodied energy?
On the other hand, the operating energy of materials can be obtained via simulation once the embodied energy is in place with the involvement of heating, cooling, lighting, and operating appliances integrated within BIM design tools.
Q22. What is the commonly used source of data for embodied energy?
Although there are a number of other sources for embodied energy data available in the UK, the most frequently used authoritative open-source of data is the ICE database from the University of Bath (Hammond and Jones, 2008).