Sustainability limit state for steel industrial buildings

Abstract

Several methods enable quantifying building's environmental performance, however, there are no values against which the obtained evaluation can be compared. This is caused by scarcity of environmental impact data for buildings of similar typologies. With sustainability demands rising worldwide, these impacts, as major climate change contributors, cannot be ignored: there is a need for a systematic and transparent procedure of verifying whether the considered building solution falls into a sustainable one and, if it does, how much it helps in reducing the different impacts. With the goal of including the sustainability aspect in the design provisions, efforts were recently made in establishing the sustainability limit state for the structural part of residential buildings analogous to the safety limit states of structural Eurocodes. This paper treats the sustainability limit state with respect to Global Warming Potential (GWP) of another group of buildings, steel industrial buildings. For this purpose, two large databases are compiled: a database of steel industrial buildings with pitched‐roof portal frames and a database of GWP in the production phase of the relevant steel products. The two databases together yield the structural GWP database. From it, expressions for GWP curves of industrial building structures, as well as the expected emissions, are derived. Finally, a practical example is given showing the major factors affecting the sustainability of a referent structure.