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Title: Investigating life cycle performance of hospital building refurbishment through low carbon measures: An integrated methodological framework
With the increasing demand on energy and overuse of the finite natural resources, the concept of environmental sustainability become prominent all over the world. To reduce the energy consumption levels and natural resource depletion, transformational changes for the built environment has been stimulated. In terms of overall lifetime building performance, refurbishment plays an important role and provides economic, social and environmental benefits.
The health sector, one of the largest sectors of the economy, has a significant contribution to environmental degradation with hospitals and healthcare buildings. In the UK, hospital building construction occupy a substantial place and show considerable changes. The hospital building stock of the National Health Service (NHS) consists of a wide range of building archetypes built over the past century. Many of the historic NHS buildings have poor insulation levels or too much glazing, whilst very few of them were designed to be air-conditioned. To achieve the UK target for 80% reduction in buildings GHG emissions by 2050, NHS has a target that all buildings to be low carbon. Refurbishing existing hospital buildings through the application of low carbon measures has great potential to reduce building energy consumption and carbon emissions. This research, therefore, aims to develop and validate a comprehensive method that integrates optimization and life cycle performance assessment in order to achieve sustainability in building refurbishment of hospital buildings in the UK, considering the use of low impact building materials.