Life Cycle Costing of Building Envelope In Composite Climate

Abstract

In a developing country like India, there is already a greater scope of planning and development across every field. Construction industry plays a major role in the development of the country’s economy. With the continuous hike in population growth, there is an increasing need for the facilities and infrastructure in order to make a comfortable livable space for people. Eventually, there will be the requirement of construction of new buildings as well as infrastructure and the expansion of urban areas. And this is not a breaking news, that the building sector is consuming a vast majority of the natural resources so as to meet the needs of urbanization. Hence, there’s a need of efficient solutions that are viable for the economy, environment and the people of the country.

The envelope accounts for almost 40% of overall energy use. A well designed envelope can impact about 50% of the building energy use. The purpose of this research is to assess the life cycle cost of the selected types of building envelopes and their components in composite climate, typically in office buildings.

In this study, the scope is limited to the identified elements of building envelope: conventional brick wall, AAC block wall, Cavity wall and structural glazing. A model is designed for the study of alternatives as a building envelope through simulation using eQuest energy modelling software. Its outcome gave the alternative which consumes comparatively higher energy, i.e. structural glazing and the alternative which consumes least energy i.e. AAC block wall. Then the LCC was calculated for all the four alternatives and the result is compared with simulation results. This gave out that AAC block wall is the least energy consuming alternative and have the life cycle cost approximately similar to the cavity wall, which is the most cost-effective out of all four.