A Comparative Analysis of LCA Tools: Studying the Façade of a Campus Lab Building

Abstract

By the advancement of sustainable design methods, life cycle assessment (LCA) is becoming a significant part of sustainable practices. To have reliable assessment results the strengths and weaknesses of the assessment tools should be explored. This thesis studies the life cycle assessment as a method to evaluate the environmental impacts of the buildings. The purpose of this study is to compare the analyses results of two LCA tools: the Revit-based Tally plugin and the Athena Impact Estimator (IE). The study explores a building façade system as the case study in three different scales of the primary materials, components, and whole-building façade. Athena IE and Tally are applied to the case study to compare the user input framework, bill of materials, and outputs. While the development of BIM-based LCA tools helps designers, engineers, and contractors, this study finds that the tools are highly dependent on the data input methods to have reliable LCA outcomes. So, by the improvements of software interfaces, a wider consideration of the input methods is necessary.