Comparative Analysis of Dynamic and Static Life Cycle Assessment: A Case Study of a Commercial Building

Carbon emissions from the building industry has significant impacts to the global warming. In the context of increasingly severe challenges posed by climate change, accurately assessing the carbon emissions throughout the entire life cycle of buildings is crucial. However, most previous studies have employed the traditional static life cycle assessment (LCA) method, neglecting the dynamic changes that buildings undergo during their life cycle. Comparative studies between dynamic and static life cycle assessments of buildings are scarce. The aim of this study is to analyze the differences in LCA results of buildings by incorporating dynamic factors. First, a static LCA model of a commercial building is established in SimaPro. Second, building information modelling (BIM) and building energy modelling program (BEMP) are integrated to generate dynamic inputs for a dynamic life cycle assessment (D-LCA) model. Revit is employed to establish the BIM model, which generates a bill of building materials. The Designer Simulation Toolkit (DeST) is utilized as the BEMP to simulate the operational energy consumption of the studied building, and the results from DeST are subsequently used as data inputs for the dynamic scenarios. The findings indicate that the differences between static and dynamic scenarios can reach up to 66.7%, with optimization of the electricity mix and incorporating global warming influences identified as the primary reasons for this significant discrepancy.