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Introduction
Zsuzsa Szalay is an associate professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Construction Materials and Technologies. Her research interests are the Life Cycle Assessment of buildings and building elements, building energy calculations and dynamic energy modelling.
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Education
September 1996 - June 2002
Publications
Publications (74)
Purpose
The production and construction of buildings cause significant environmental impacts besides those arising from their operation. Recently, some European countries have started introducing life cycle assessment as a mandatory calculation method for new buildings, and it is foreseen that by 2030 this will be done in every member state, at fir...
We are faced with the challenge of halting the accelerating increase in global temperatures caused by carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. The question is whether how we can achieve robust international objectives and fight climate change through decarbonising. At what cost? To find reasonable solution options for decarbonisation, we reviewe...
Assessment of energy performance became a necessary part of everyday architectural design as the building stock is a significant energy consumer. Different stages of a project require different granularities of evaluation. Typically, as the project moves forward, the level of geometry (LOG) of the digital assets increase, which proposes minor issue...
Climate change is recognized as a major contributor to the increase in heat-related deaths, and the frequency of heatwave days is expected to continue rising in the future. Addressing the impacts of climate change is a critical component of the United Nations' sustainable development goals, emphasizing the need for urgent action. To aid decision-ma...
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.
Architects and designers have a critical role in promoting Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a scientific methodology for evaluating the environmental impacts of buildings that can help decarbonise the built environment and minimise other negative effects.This paper presents the results of an international survey conducted among design professionals as...
We need to consider linear heat losses due to thermal bridges for the accurate calculation of building heat losses. Our research examined a whole building, and different thermal bridge calculation methods were compared. The following techniques were included in the study: a simplified method according to the Hungarian energy performance regulation...
Occupant behaviour is a field, that has always been of great interest to researchers. It could significantly modify the operation of the building and the user’s energy needs, and it is also difficult to model it according to reality. Evaluation of measurements is a crucial step to calibrate dynamic simulations. Our goal was to analyse the indoor co...
With the climate change we are experiencing today, the number and intensity of heatwaves are increasing dramatically, significantly impacting our buildings’ overheating. The majority of the prefabricated concrete panel buildings in Hungary are considered outdated from an energy point of view. These buildings may be at greater risk from extreme weat...
The paper presents the development process of an innovative, prefabricated compact house, which aims at creating a net zero greenhouse gas emission building design over the whole life cycle. Building Information Modelling helped to quantify the required building materials. Dynamic building simulations were performed in DesignBuilder to calculate th...
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...
Global Warming Potential (GWP) is one of the most important Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) indicator, which shows how much heat a greenhouse gas traps in the atmosphere relative to carbon dioxide. In this study, we calculated the GWP of a highly insulated building construction detail of a residential nearly-zero energy building (nZEB) based on numeric...
Extreme weather events, including heatwaves, are escalating with the changing climate. High outdoor temperatures increase morbidity and mortality. Heat vulnerability indices (HVIs) tend to neglect or only simplistically consider the impact of the building in their analyses. This research aims to implement the reliability analysis used in other fiel...
Purpose
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a widely used method for the evaluation of buildings’ environmental impacts, but these analyses contain high levels of uncertainty. Decarbonization of electricity production is key to reach climate goals, influencing all sectors including construction The objective of this paper is to study the sensitivity of...
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a scientific method for evaluating the environmental impact of products. Standards provide a general framework for conducting an LCA study and calculation rules specifically for buildings. The challenge is to design energy-efficient buildings that have a low environmental impact, reasonable costs, and high thermal com...
The energy performance directive mandates that all new buildings in Europe shall be "nearly zero energy" buildings. New, innovative solutions have arisen both on the demand and on the supply side of the market that aim at much more ambitious energy and environmental performance levels than nearly zero at an affordable price. The basic principle of...
Bamboo is one of the materials that have recently attracted considerable interest in sustainable buildings as they are fast growing, retaining thermal and mechanical properties similar to structural wood products, and considered effective CO2 absorbers. Several studies tried to assess the energy performance of bamboo-structures for residential buil...
In the present research, a high-resolution, detailed electric load dataset was assessed, collected by smart meters from nearly a thousand households in Hungary, many of them single-family houses. The objective was to evaluate this database in detail to determine energy consumption profiles from time series of daily and annual electric load. After r...
Introduction: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a scientific method for evaluating the environmental impact of products. Standards provide a general framework for conducting an LCA study and calculation rules specifically for buildings. A challenge is to design energy-efficient buildings that have a low environmental impact, reasonable costs, and prov...
Introduction: The international research project IEA EBC Annex 72 investigates the life cycle related environmental impacts caused by buildings. The project aims inter alia to harmonise LCA approaches on buildings. Methods: To identify major commonalities and discrepancies among national LCA approaches, reference buildings were defined to present a...
Sudan is suffering from harsh summers, but most of the modern buildings in urban areas are not compatible with the recent and future climate phenomena. Application of cooling devices is relatively expensive and therefore beyond reach. The main objective of this research is to give an overview on the overheating problem and the thermal comfort in bu...
The paper presents the public building typology, energy demand estimations and retrofit scenarios, as well as associated costs and benefits for energy-saving measures in the public building stock of Albania. First, representative building types were identified to estimate their energy performance, and define retrofit packages. Second, this informat...
Fired clay masonry blocks are one of the most common building elements in Europe to construct thermal envelopes of buildings. However, due to current energy performance requirements, thermal insulation of buildings has become inevitable. Brick producers, therefore, started to develop their products and, as a possible solution, they come up with the...
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an increasingly widespread method for the environmental accounting of products and services. Since almost all production processes use grid electricity, the environmental impact of power generation plays a key role in LCA. There is high potential both on a local and a regional scale for improving electricity generatio...
The application of heuristic algorithms with life cycle assessment (LCA) is a promising approach to efficiently optimize the building and minimize the environmental impact even in a very large design space. In this paper, a modular parametric optimization framework combining advanced building modelling, LCA, energy calculation and single- and multi...
This paper will present objectives and first results of the research project entitled “Large Scale Smart Meter Data Assessment for Energy Benchmarking and Occupant Behaviour Profile Development of Building Clusters,” implemented in the geographical scope of Hungary. The project seeks to utilize a new and unique opportunity for accessing and process...
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...
Sudan suffers from hard summers with temperatures approaching 42 0C in the South and 48 0C in the North. In spite of that, the technical solutions in buildings for protection against solar radiation and natural ventilation are generally beyond reach. There isn’t sufficient information provided on the characteristics of the building stock, building...
In recent years the application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for assessing and improving the environmental performance of buildings has increased. At the same time, the automated optimization of building designs is gaining attraction for both design and research purposes. In this regard, a number of issues persist when aiming to optimize building...
The frequency and magnitude of summer heatwaves has significantly increased in Hungary in recent years, and research shows that we can expect the same level of temperature anomalies in the near future. For this paper we performed dynamic simulations of nursing homes to examine the effect of building types and construction methods on summer overheat...
The duration and frequency of summer heatwaves in Europe have substantially increased recently due to climate change. A clear correlation can be shown between the rise in outside temperature and the risk of mortality. The aim of our research is to examine the nursing homes in Budapest from this point of view. Therefore, a survey was conducted in wh...
In the environmental analysis of buildings, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is gaining more and more interest. It is due to the fact, that LCA is very comprehensive in considering many impacts in all life-cycle phases of the examined building. Since buildings have a complicated geometry that is built up with numerous constructions that consist of many...
Building life cycle assessment is getting more and more attention within the topic of environmental impact caused by the built environment. Although more and more research focus on the embodied impact of buildings, the investigation of the operational energy use still needs attention. The majority of the building stock still does not comply with th...
For environmental accounting of buildings Life Cycle Assessment is a proper and more and more widespread method. The assessment of the embodied materials is well covered by constantly improving databases (Life Cycle Inventories). On the other hand, calculation methods for the operation phase of the buildings vary in the literature. Specifically the...
The paper presents the residential sector building typology, thermal energy balance, and scenarios prepared at several levels of sector segmentation to assist the design of low-carbon development policies for Albania, Serbia, and Montenegro. The research is breakthrough for developing Europe and could be replicated in its countries. The paper descr...
Life Cycle Assessment is a more and more widely used method for the environmental evaluation of buildings. In this paper, we present a modular methodology for the environmental assessment and optimisation of buildings. The methodology is implemented in a parametric design tool where the building geometry can be modelled in 3D, then the energy perfo...
Thermal energy demand in the residential building sector represents a big challenge for Serbia. In order to understand how to reduce this demand, and thereby avoiding GHG gas emissions, a bottom-up simulation model was developed. The model built the business-as-usual and two decarbonization scenarios up to 2030. For each scenario, such results as u...
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an advantageous tool for the analysis of the overall environmental
effects of a building. Most of the decisions that influence the final result of an LCA are made
during the design process of the building. Therefore, LCA in early design stages is crucial, because
the changes in this period of design are cheaper and mo...
The specific energy consumption of non-residential buildings, of which more than 30% are public buildings, is 50% higher than of residential buildings. The European funded A2PBEER project, therefore, aims at demonstrating the affordable and energy efficient retrofit of public buildings on three real projects covering main climatic areas of Europe....
The sustainable refurbishment of the existing building stock is a key issue in achieving the ambitious long-term energy and environmental goals of the European Union. Europe has a vast building stock built with prefabricated reinforced concrete large-panel construction technology after World War II to decrease the general housing shortage, mostly i...
The goal of the European Union is to drastically cut its domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since the building sector has been identified as one of the key sectors for cost-efficient savings, here at least 88-91% reduction is necessary to reach these ambitious targets. It is possible to build or retrofit to a high energy standard, but energ...
Recent national and international building regulations on the energy performance of buildings focus mainly on the reduction of operational energy. This can be achieved by increasing the energy efficiency of the building, installing highly efficient building service systems and applying renewable energy sources. However, these measures have a price...
According to the recast of the European Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings Member States shall ensure that (a) by 31 December 2020, all new buildings are nearly zero-energy buildings; and (b) after 31 December 2018, new buildings occupied and owned by public authorities are nearly zero-energy buildings. It is the responsibility of the...
The building sector, accounting for about 40% of the energy consumption of the EU, provides a great potential for cost-effective energy savings. The recent recast of the Directive in 2010 calls for more concrete actions and further harmonisation of the approaches in the Member States to realise the full potential for energy savings in buildings. It...
The recast of the Energy Performance Building Directive contains a new article about the need to increase the number of buildings which go beyond current national requirements, and to draw up national plans for increasing the number of nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEB) with the final target that by 2020 all new buildings shall be nearly-zero ener...
The prefabricated reinforced concrete large-panel construction method was spreading throughout Europe during the reconstruction work following the World War II in order to decrease the general housing shortage. During the 1970s and 1980s, altogether 510.000 flats of this type were built throughout Hungary, therefore their refurbishment is inevitabl...
The expert system presented in this paper is able to evaluate the energy performance of buildings and to perform two types of optimization for retrofit design based on Bacterial Evolutionary Algorithms. The cost efficient retrofit finds the best energetic improvement from a given budget, while the energy efficient renovation minimises the
retrofit...
In passive houses and nearly-zero energy buildings, a well constructed building envelope and an efficient building service system can achieve an extremely low space heating energy demand in the operational phase. However, these energy saving measures may have a negative impact on the other phases of the life cycle: the initial and recurring embodie...
Historic buildings, while of great historical, architectural and townscape value, often consume large amounts of energy. This paper demonstrates through international examples that it is feasible to upgrade this architectural heritage in a sustainable way, while increasing the comfort of the occupants and preserving the architectural qualities of t...
The Energy Performance Building Directive 2002/91/EC (EPBD), issued by the European Commission, gave a general framework for the calculation of the integrated energy perfor-mance of buildings. The Directive was adapted and imple-mented by the EU's Member States in 2006. The Hungarian regulation was worked out in the Department of Building Energetic...
The effect of energy efficiency measures is generally evaluated for one or only a few houses. While the energy and environmental optimization of a particular building design is crucial, this cannot easily draw generic conclusions for future building designs. A method is presented for considering the effect of building geometry in simplified energy...
New legislation, most notably the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) has brought more stringent requirements on the operational energy consumption of buildings.
However, the energy and emissions corresponding to the construction and maintenance of buildings are often significant as well.
The life-cycle of building materials, buildi...
Decisions made by architects in the present can influence the global energy, economic and ecological scene for up to a century. Of the annual gross energy consumption 40–50%—and the corresponding emissions—are related to the construction, operation and maintenance of buildings in Europe.The growing concern of professionals and the general public ab...
https://repozitorium.omikk.bme.hu/bitstream/handle/10890/769/ertekezes.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
The aim of this work is to study the possibilities for energy-conscious and environmental-friendly retrofitting of single-family houses in Sweden and Hungary. According to the climate, energetic, architectural characteristics of the countries, the following options were studied in more detail: additional insulation of buildings, passive solar gain...
Beside the many ecological advantages of timber as structural material, a general argument against its use is the low thermal mass, which might contribute to summer overheating. A simplified method based on the EN 832:1998 is used to compare construction systems typical in the residential sector. The ratio of the effective thermal capacity and the...