The effect of applying greenery systems on a building's sustainability performance

Urbanisation has increased the worlds' cities populations and influenced the living conditions within these cities. Temperatures rise, the air becomes more polluted and noise levels increase. It has been proven that types of vegetation such as plants and trees can reduce the negative effects of urbanisation by for instance cooling cities,...

Lowering ECI/MPG value by implementing sustainable foundations for houses

This research addresses the environmental impact of foundations in lightweight housing units, focusing on BAM's timber house concept, FLOW. While the engineered timber superstructure is environmentally conscious, the foundation's contribution is often overlooked. The study aims to minimise the Environmental Cost Indicator (ECI) of FLOW houses by...

Towards emission-free sea dike revetments: Making sustainable design choices by employing probabilistic safety assessment and integrating the environmental cost indicator in the parametric design process of sea dike revetments

Large parts of the Netherlands lay below mean sea level. An extensive network of flood protection measures is in place to prevent flooding. Periodic safety assessment and reinforcement are required to guarantee a resilient system. Currently, in the Netherlands, an extensive sea dike reinforcement program is underway to meet the safety standards...

From least-weight to least-environmental-impacting truss structures: A method to minimize the total environmental cost with the Ground Structure Method for the welding, coating and construction material

Climate change is changing the world. Where previously efficient use of materials was mainly applied to realize cost savings, this can also help to reduce the footprint of a construction. There is a rather direct and obvious relationship between the amount of material required in a construction and its environmental impact. Of course, the...

Evading the Public Eye: On Astroturfing in Open Aviation Data †

The usage of large private and business jets, from those owned by Elon Musk to Kylie Jenner and Bernard Arnault, has recently attracted considerable attention in many countries. Enabled by open and crowdsourced aircraft tracking systems based on the automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast protocol, the aircraft and their owners have been...

Optimum Design Framework for Environmental Cost Indicators in Multi Tenant Residential Building Structures

Buildings are responsible for 40% of the total global energy use and over 30% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. To minimize environmental impact, building designers are increasingly looking beyond traditional design methods to optimize building designs for low environmental impact. Despite the high variety of environmental impact...

Evaluation of Aviation Emissions and Environmental Costs in Europe Using OpenSky and OpenAP

In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach that estimates cruise-level flight emissions over Europe using OpenSky ADS-B data and OpenAP emission models. Flight information, including position, altitude, speed, and the vertical rate are obtained from the OpenSky historical database, gathered at a sample rate of 15 s. Emissions from each...

Rationalising the Structural Material Choice Process for High Rise Buildings in the Netherlands

The goal of this thesis is to create a decision-making framework for the structural material choice for high rise buildings (between 70 m and 250 m) in the Netherlands. The main research question is: How is the structural material for a high rise building in the Netherlands chosen and how can this process become structured? Currently of the...

Closed Loops, Open Justice: Creating circular construction flows, for a just social housing industry

In the province of South Holland steps have been taken to create a circular construction industry to mitigate current linear processes. These linear processes include wasteful resource-intensive models that lead to loss of value and depletion of raw materials. However, to achieve a complete circular construction industry, the true social and...

An Eco-Effective Structure: A qualitative approach into eco-effective structural design perspectives, criteria, and strategies both in theory as in practice

Globally the construction is a major contributor to the severity of the anthropogenic environmental impact. The sector emits 39% of the global CO2 and is responsible of 40-50% of material flows. The focus of reducing the environmental impact in buildings is, in the past, mostly attributed to the operational energy. However, due to increasing...

The Sustainable Office. An exploration of the potential for factor 20 environmental improvement of office accommodation

Sustainable development is the goal of a balance between economy and the environment, whilst establishing a better spread prosperity across the world. In order to make this possible, the environmental load of our commodities needs to be reduced by a factor of 20. This factor 20 can also be translated to the office market. The PhD research...