Materals Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Materals - Assignment Example Reducing the embodied energy in building materials form an important part of the new construction process. Source: Embodied energy in house construction, Energy Efficiency, 2006 Embodied Energy The Green Book brings out 18 recommendations on methods to reduce carbon emissions. This book forms an effective guideline in the designing of building using low cost materials. Embodied energy is the total energy that is required to construct buildings using materials like cement, aluminium and steel. However, this energy is not just the direct energy used but the total energy that would be required to source the material, transport it and ultimately use it in the construction. (Lucuik Mark, 2007) A few examples to further elaborate this point are as follows. Concrete blocks used in the construction industry involve not just the energy used in manufacturing the block but is the summation of the energy that would be involved in transporting it from the sourced location like China to its destin ation location like Saudi Arabia. It would also involve the additional energy that would be further required to process the bricks at the site to enable it in laying. Therefore any amount of energy that is used in the drilling and excavating machines to the energy that is used to sustain the people engaged in the excavation operations all sum up to form the total embodied energy of the product. ... an average it is said that a distribution warehouse has 60% embodied carbon, a supermarket which is always well lit up and uses lot of external energy during its operational time has an embodied carbon of 20%. A normal house has an embodied content of 30% which is somewhere between a warehouse and supermarket. The RICS further provides a certain degree of lifespan to each kind of building ranging from 20 to 75 years. (Lane Thomas, 2010) Therefore apart from the kind of construction, the total life span of the building structure all go into accounting the embodied carbon efficiency of materials. Measuring the carbon footprint of a building is a twofold process. It involves calculating the energy that is required in constructing the building and also adding the embodied energy of the materials that are replaced over a period of time during the building lifecycle. A number of tools apart from the RICS are available in the market that can predict exactly the embodied energy of the materi als that are used in the design of the building structure. These give an idea about the embodied energy in construction and also the operational energy that would be used in the years to come. The problem however in using the different software’s that are available in the market are that each tool provides a different value of embodied carbon data. Hence the results that are obtained from different tools might differ. The other problem includes some industries like the Steel Industry providing blast furnace slag to the concrete industry. This enables them to claim that embodied energy of steel industry is lesser than concrete industry since they are actually conserving energy by utilising the energy used in the kilns to other industrial areas. However standardization of these embodied