Bruno Peuportier

Mines Paris · center for energy efficiency of systems

Purpose Due to climate change, the severity and length of heat waves are increasing, and this trend is likely to continue while mitigation efforts are insufficient. These climatic events cause overheating inside buildings, which increases mortality. Adaptation measures reduce overheating but induce environmental impacts, including on human health....

Wood and bio-based construction products are perceived as a way to use renewable resources, to save energy and to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG)-emissions during production and to store carbon during the entire service life of the building. This article compares the carbon footprint per kilogram of wood products (softwood beams, plywood, oriented st...

Dynamic building energy simulation and life cycle assessment (LCA) are useful ecodesign tools to mitigate the energy and environmental impacts of buildings. Various uncertain factors can affect the building energy and environmental modelling, including continuous and categorical factors (i.e., discrete factors without logical ranking). Sensitivity...

Purpose Life cycle assessment (LCA) methods are used in building ecodesign, but do not currently consider indoor air quality (IAQ). Since we spend about 85% of our time indoors, and are exposed to potentially hazardous substances, IAQ is of particular importance to human health. Its consideration in LCA could help make adequate design choices (e.g....

Containing global warming to 1.5 °C implies staying on a given carbon budget and therefore being able to design net zero carbon buildings by 2050. A case study corresponding to a French residential building is used to assess the feasibility of achieving this target. Starting from an actual construction built in 2016, various improvement measures ar...

The climate data used for dynamic energy simulation of buildings located in urban regions are usually collected in meteorological stations situated in rural areas, which do not accurately represent the urban microclimate (e.g., urban heat island effect), and this might affect the simulation accuracy. This paper aims at quantitatively evaluating the...

The purpose of this report is to illustrate the contribution of the International Energy Agency - Energy in Buildings and Communities (IEA EBC) Programme Annex 72 members to the topic of life-cycle multi- objective optimization of buildings performance.

Wood and other bio-based building materials are often perceived as a good choice from a climate mitigation perspective. This article compares the life cycle assessment of the same multi-residential building from the perspective of 16 countries participating in the international project Annex 72 of the International Energy Agency to determine the ef...

Boundary conditions of a building directly influence the evaluation results of its environmental impacts. This study aims at improving the method of evaluating the environmental impacts of the building in China, by integrating three boundary conditions: the ground, the microclimate and the background system considered in life cycle assessment (LCA)...

In order to progress towards more energy efficient buildings, vertical ground coupled heat pumps are a promising solution. Optimisation of both the design and operation of boreholes heat exchangers is a key factor to reduce energy consumption of such systems. This requires a fast evaluation of the thermal response factor of the ground heat exchange...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is increasingly being used as a tool by the building industry and actors to assess the global warming potential (GWP) of building activities. In several countries, life cycle based requirements on GWP are currently being incorporated into building regulations. After the establishment of general calculation rules for buil...

The contribution of technologies in numerical simulation The scale of the environmental impacts, and the associated external costs, make an energy and ecological transition necessary. This context makes it essential to thoroughly renovate the existing building stock. To massify this renovation, it is useful to seek solutions at lower cost, and to r...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used to reduce a building's environmental impacts in the design phase. Buildings consume a lot of electricity, and heat pumps are often proposed as a way to reduce greenhouse gases emissions. The electricity production mix is therefore an important aspect in building's LCA. Many studies use a static national av...

PurposeThe built environment is a key sector for the transition towards a so-called circular economy, contributing to solve the global environmental challenges humanity is facing. As buildings interact with other sectors like transport and energy, a systemic approach is needed to assess the environmental relevance of circular economy practices. The...

The building stock is a major contributor to energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions (GHG), which can be evaluated using life cycle assessment (LCA). Electrification of buildings, e.g. replacing fuel and gas boilers with heat pumps, in order to reduce these emissions is often seen as an option, but this will have short term effects by inc...

L'identification de stratégies de réhabilitation optimales pour un parc de bâtiments est une tâche complexe. De nombreuses actions de rénovation sont envisageables à l'échelle d'un parc. De plus, du fait de contraintes budgétaires, il convient de déterminer dans quels bâtiments et dans quelles actions de rénovations investir en premier lieu. Pour a...

Identifying optimal refurbishment strategies for a building stock is a challenging task. Numerous energy efficiency measures can be undertaken for each building. In addition, under financial constraints, real estate owners have to decide in which buildings and renovation actions to invest first, as well as how to plan renovations over time. A metho...

Over the last decade, the concept of the circular economy (CE) has gained momentum among practitioners, politicians, and scholars because of its promise of achieving sustainability goals. However, there is still a need to demonstrate and assess the positive environmental impacts of the CE. With respect to the building sector, the CE is still a rela...

The PULSE-PARIS research project (Urban project eco-design in conjunction with the City strategic plan regarding circular economy) aims at evaluate circular economy practices through the use of LCA-based tools. In this framework, life cycle assessment has been performed to evaluate circular economy practices at the scale of an urban project eco-des...

Vertical ground coupled heat pump (GCHP) systems used in buildings in China can help to increase the share of renewable energy and improve the energy efficiency. A building energy simulation (BES) tool including a vertical GCHP model is beneficial for analysing the system performance under dynamic building loads. This paper presents a large-scale v...

Multi-objective optimisation coupled with building energy simulation (BES) and life cycle assessment (LCA) models is a promising method to eco-design net-zero energy buildings (NZEBs) in line with sustainable objectives such as UN SDG’s goals 7, 11, 12 and 13. This paper presents a method of building multi-objective optimisation based on NSGA-II co...

The application of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique to a building requires the collection and organization of a large amount of data over its life cycle. The systematic decomposition method can be used to classify building components, elements and materials, overcome specific difficulties that are encountered when attempting to complete th...

The present paper gives an overview of a French national project on building performance. Named COMEPOS, started in 2013, it focuses on « Positive Energy » detached houses. It consists in the design, construction, operation and evaluation of 20 inhabited and innovative houses. This collaborative project includes constructors, industrial and academi...

Purpose The 71st LCA forum was held on 18 June 2019 in Zurich, Switzerland, to discuss the current status and future plans of environmental benchmarking for buildings in view of the 1.5 °C target stipulated in the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement requires a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, in fact net zero by 2050. One of the...

The IEA EBC Annex 72 focuses on the assessment of the primary energy demand, greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts of buildings during production, construction, use (including repair and replacement) and end of life (dismantling), i.e. during the entire life cycle of buildings. In one of its activities, reference buildings (size, mater...

Over the last decade, the concept of circular economy has gained momentum among practitioners, politicians and scholars, with the promise to achieve sustainability goals (Geissdoerfer et al. 2017). However, there is still a need to demonstrate and assess its positive environmental impacts (Bocken et al. 2017; Haupt and Zschokke 2016). With respect...

A common practice in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of buildings is to consider a default value for their lifespans. However, statistical data show longer lifespans and it is proved that the higher they are the lower the environmental impacts. Therefore, the common practice of considering a default value for lifespans in buildings LCA involves a high...

Building life cycle assessment (LCA) aims at guiding decision towards more sustainable alternatives of a building project. But, in order to successfully reduce the high environmental impacts of the building sector, the results of building LCA have to be robust. Sensitivity analysis (SA) helps at investigating the sources of uncertainty and variabil...

In France, buildings account for a significant portion of the electricity consumption (around 68%), due to an important use of electrical heating systems. This results in high peak load in winter and causes tensions on the production-consumption balance. In view of reducing such fluctuations, advanced control systems (including the Model Predictive...

Sustainability is now targeted in nearly all urban projects, but the importance of environmental problems regarding e.g. climate change, human health, biodiversity and resource depletion would require a more precise decision making process than the present qualitative approach generally adopted. By providing a quantitative assessment of impact indi...

PurposeThis study aims at accounting for the variation in electricity production, processes and related impacts depending on season (heating, cooling), day of the week (tertiary building) and hour of the day. In this context, this paper suggests two alternative methods to integrate grid-building interaction in life cycle assessment of buildings and...

In France, 40% of buildings are heated with electrical devices causing high peak load in winter. In this context, advanced control systems could improve buildings energy management. More specifically, optimal strategies have been developed using a dynamic programming method in order to shift heating load, taking advantage of the building thermal ma...

Being highly insulated, low-energy buildings are very sensitive to variable solar and internal gains. In this context, some modelling assumptions frequently used in simplified building energy simulation tools might be called into question. While higher insulation levels reduce the influence of heat transmission through opaque walls, absorption of s...

The objective of this study is to evaluate life cycle impacts of buildings, integrating climate change (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 IPCC scenarios) and evolution of the energy mix on the long term (at 2050). Two methodological approaches were developed following the modelling principles of attributional and consequential life cycle assessment (LCA). The me...

The ecodesign of the built environment and the infrastructure Tools for assessing the environmental impact of constructed zones and infrastructure projects exist that take into account: the production of construction materials; construction sites; processes ranging from the consumption (heating, water) of buildings up till their demolition; and was...

Building life cycle assessment (LCA) tools aim at helping the decision-making towards more sustainable built environments. In order to reach this goal, such tools need to be robust. However, practitioners are facing many choices in a project, leading to uncertainties in the results. In order to understand which factors induce the most uncertainty,...

To meet the current challenges of sustainable development, the environmental assessment of urban projects is essential to developing substantial arguments regarding their performances. To do so, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) starts to be applied to large systems such as neighborhoods. The advantages of this methodology (e.g. evaluating pollution...

Sustainability is now targeted in nearly all urban projects, but life cycle assessment (LCA) is generally seen as too complex, so that more qualitative approaches are preferred. Indeed, the importance of environmental problems regarding e.g. climate change, human health, biodiversity and resource depletion justifies a more precise decision making p...

Building life cycle assessment (LCA) tools help designing more sustainable built environments and have therefore to be robust. However, LCA practitioners are facing a lot of choices (methods, scenarios, parameters values) inducing uncertainty in the results or model output and potentially changing the ranking of different project alternatives. It i...

A building life cycle assessment tool was developed and linked with an energy simulation tool, allowing to take into account the strong interactions between the energy and the environmental performance of buildings. This life cycle assessement tool was then extended at the urban level to evaluate the environmental impacts of a district including ma...

The objective of this work is to provide a design aid in order to improve environmental quality of buildings and neighbourhoods, regarding both existing or new construction. A tool based on the Life Cycle Assessment methodology has been developed to compare alternative designs of buildings and urban settlement projects. It integrates various types...

Oeuvrant tous à la conception ou la réhabilitation énergétique des bâtiments, domaine de plus en plus important où les objectifs environnementaux d'une part et la réglementation de l'autre encouragent à l'amélioration des performances, les auteurs exposent dans ce livre de référence quels sont les différents modèles d'outils de simulation énergétiq...

The development of on-site renewable energy production and demand management in buildings calls for a deeper understanding of the interaction between building operation and the electricity grid. Electricity consumption in buildings varies in terms of seasons (heating and cooling), day of the week (professional activities) and hour of the day, which...

Purpose The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been applied in the construction sector since the 1990s and is now more and more embedded in European public policies, e.g., for Environmental Product Declaration regulation or for building labeling schemes. As far as the authors know, these initiatives mainly rely on background impact data of building pr...

A growing number of urban inhabitants are aware of pressing environmental concerns. This book aims to provide information about relevant environmental quality criteria in urban construction settings, before methods are proposed for assessing these criteria. These will be extremely helpful to eco-building designs, commencing from the very early stag...

In France, 40 % of buildings are heated with electrical devices causing high peak load in winter. In this context, optimal strategies (under constraints related to comfort and maximum heating power) have been developed using the dynamic programming method in order to shift electricity consumption used for heating, taking advantage of the building t...

Building energy simulation (BES) is currently used to design comfortable and energy efficient buildings, e.g. by comparing architectural alternatives. However, usual assumptions on occupancy are too simplistic and do not correspond to real situations. According to performance monitoring experiments, measured buildings consumptions are generally hig...

Being increasingly insulated, new buildings are more and more sensitive to variations of solar and internal gains. Due to an important use of electrical heating systems, especially in housing, France is facing a growing problem of peak load on its electricity grid. Controlling the heating system often constitutes an efficient solution to shift heat...

Existing tool for environmental impact assessment of buildings and districts according to the LCA procedure are based upon a static method, considering yearly average processes and impacts. A dynamic method has been developed in order to model the temporal variation of electricity production and allocate environmental impacts to different uses. It...

Complying with international agreements regarding environment, and particularly the reduction of greenhouse gases emissions, requires appropriate policies in the building sector. This study concerns single family housing in Chile. The aim of this work is to develop knowledge in order to define and prepare implementation of design procedures to mini...

A simplified PCM wallboard model is coupled to an existing design-oriented model of multi-zone buildings. Using a reference model and a basic simulation configuration, the accuracy of the resulting PCM wallboard-building thermal design tool is evaluated. A new performance indicator, called PCM utilization factor, is then proposed in order to estima...

La chaire Éco-conception des ensembles bâtis et des infrastructures, créée par ParisTech en partenariat avec VINCI, a pour vocation de créer des outils de mesure et de simulation qui intègrent toutes les dimensions de l’éco-conception (émissions de gaz à effet de serre, impact sur la biodiversité, prélèvement sur les ressources, etc.) pour devenir...

A characterization and modeling process has been conducted in order to better account for ventilative cooling in the evaluation of energy performance of buildings. The proposed approach has been tested using a monitored zero energy Active House (Maison Air et lumière) located near Paris. The air flow characteristics of a pivoted roof window have be...

A building life cycle simulation tool has been developed and linked to thermal simulation, allowing energy use and other environmental impacts to be evaluated. Existing building LCA tools are based upon a static method, considering yearly average processes and impacts. A dynamic method has been developed here in order to model the time variation of...