Life Cycle Assessment For Carbon Emission Of Residential Building

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission causing global warming has become a common concern to the international community, and construction has always been the main field of energy consumption and GHG emission worldwide. With China’s economic development accelerating the urbanization process, while dwelling is a major part of city, the construction quantity is quite huge; it produces much greenhouse gases during its construction and usage. As a result, reducing carbon emission of dwelling buildings has special significance for energy conservation and emission reduction in China.The study was carried out based on the life cycle assessment (LCA), dwelling building life cycle carbon emission evaluation methodology was put forward in line with condition of different phases of building in China. By consulting abundant literature both at home and abroad, analyzing and calculating the given data, basic data of each life cycle phase of dwelling building was obtained. Carbon emission data base of the seven processes (building material production, transportation, construction, heating and cooling equipments production, usage, maintainance and demolishment) ware established, which can provide data support for calculating the building life cycle carbon emission.As vast of datas are involved in the building life cycle process, the computational process is miscellaneous, it would be much likely to make mistakes by accounting artificially. The procedure of“Residential building life cycle carbon emission.exe”was programmed by Visual Basic 6.0, and the life cycle carbon emission data base was established. The procedure interface is simple, detailed and easy to use, which could be convenience for designers to evaluate building life cycle carbon emission, and shorten the appraisal time, meanwhile increase veracity of the results.In this paper,a typical Energy-saving residential building in Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city was selected as an example, the life cycle carbon emission of it was accounted by“Residential building life cycle carbon emission.exe”. At the same time, the variation of life cycle carbon emission was analyzed by means of changing the thickness of insulating layer, cold and heat sources, service life, etc. finally, according to the analysis results, various kinds of emission reduction ways and the reduction potential are discussed.