LOCAST: Enabling Low-Carbon Structures by Understanding Human Effects of Motion
Lead Research Organisation:
Swansea University
Department Name: College of Human and Health Sciences
Abstract
We urgently need to use a lot less material in tall buildings to reduce carbon emissions, but cannot do this until we know how occupants will be affected.
Constructing buildings accounts for at least 11% of all global carbon emissions. Thanks to advances in technology and renewable electricity, a modern building already has a low carbon cost once in operation, and most of its lifetime emissions come from its construction ? particularly creating and disposing of carbon-heavy materials like concrete, steel and glass.
The world expects to see 41,000 more tall buildings by 2050 and we could dramatically reduce their construction emissions if they used less concrete and steel. Shorter multi-storey buildings could use low-carbon structural materials like timber. In both cases, while these buildings would be as safe as today and would last as long, they would inevitably be more flexible and would sway more in the wind. Critically, we do not know how this might affect occupants' wellbeing, comfort and productivity.
International building design standards currently assume that perceptible swaying motion is always unacceptable for occupants. They therefore demand that building sway is totally imperceptible, except in the most rare and extreme weather. To meet these exacting standards, buildings are over-engineered with disproportionately large amounts of carbon-intensive materials. There are multiple concerns with these widespread practices: (1) today's standards are based on questionable estimates of how much sway motion occupants can perceive; (2) they take a one-size-fits-all approach that does not distinguish between different types of building or occupant; (3) they assume any regular perceptible motion will be unacceptable to occupants, when this is not evidenced; (4) they assume building motion is acceptable when it is not consciously felt, despite growing evidence that this is not correct; and (5) most fundamentally, they are unable to draw upon scientific understanding of how building sway motion affects the human body and how this, in turn, impacts occupants' comfort and wellbeing - because there is none.
LOCAST will, for the first time, show when and why sway motion is acceptable or unacceptable to people inside buildings by rigorously measuring the human effects of this motion. Through a genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration of structural engineers, physiologists and psychologists, we will transform the current level of scientific understanding, making it objective and evidence-based. We will use world-leading UK research infrastructure to simulate real building movement, assessing in detail for the first time how the human body is affected, how this in turn affects people's levels of wellbeing, comfort and productivity, and what is the role of people's expectations in shaping this process.
To ensure real-world advances, we will rapidly and effectively disseminate our findings so that they can be embedded in next-generation building-design guidelines, based for the first time on objective human factors. This will be greatly facilitated by our team members sitting on key ISO and BSI building standards committees. These new evidence-backed guidelines will empower the construction industry to make much more judicious use of the millions of tonnes of carbon-intensive materials that it consumes globally to build thousands of towers each year. Our close partnership with the construction sector ? who were already involved in co-creating this project's scope ? means we know that by shaping human-centric guidelines, LOCAST will meet an urgent and clear need from within the industry.
Constructing buildings accounts for at least 11% of all global carbon emissions. Thanks to advances in technology and renewable electricity, a modern building already has a low carbon cost once in operation, and most of its lifetime emissions come from its construction ? particularly creating and disposing of carbon-heavy materials like concrete, steel and glass.
The world expects to see 41,000 more tall buildings by 2050 and we could dramatically reduce their construction emissions if they used less concrete and steel. Shorter multi-storey buildings could use low-carbon structural materials like timber. In both cases, while these buildings would be as safe as today and would last as long, they would inevitably be more flexible and would sway more in the wind. Critically, we do not know how this might affect occupants' wellbeing, comfort and productivity.
International building design standards currently assume that perceptible swaying motion is always unacceptable for occupants. They therefore demand that building sway is totally imperceptible, except in the most rare and extreme weather. To meet these exacting standards, buildings are over-engineered with disproportionately large amounts of carbon-intensive materials. There are multiple concerns with these widespread practices: (1) today's standards are based on questionable estimates of how much sway motion occupants can perceive; (2) they take a one-size-fits-all approach that does not distinguish between different types of building or occupant; (3) they assume any regular perceptible motion will be unacceptable to occupants, when this is not evidenced; (4) they assume building motion is acceptable when it is not consciously felt, despite growing evidence that this is not correct; and (5) most fundamentally, they are unable to draw upon scientific understanding of how building sway motion affects the human body and how this, in turn, impacts occupants' comfort and wellbeing - because there is none.
LOCAST will, for the first time, show when and why sway motion is acceptable or unacceptable to people inside buildings by rigorously measuring the human effects of this motion. Through a genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration of structural engineers, physiologists and psychologists, we will transform the current level of scientific understanding, making it objective and evidence-based. We will use world-leading UK research infrastructure to simulate real building movement, assessing in detail for the first time how the human body is affected, how this in turn affects people's levels of wellbeing, comfort and productivity, and what is the role of people's expectations in shaping this process.
To ensure real-world advances, we will rapidly and effectively disseminate our findings so that they can be embedded in next-generation building-design guidelines, based for the first time on objective human factors. This will be greatly facilitated by our team members sitting on key ISO and BSI building standards committees. These new evidence-backed guidelines will empower the construction industry to make much more judicious use of the millions of tonnes of carbon-intensive materials that it consumes globally to build thousands of towers each year. Our close partnership with the construction sector ? who were already involved in co-creating this project's scope ? means we know that by shaping human-centric guidelines, LOCAST will meet an urgent and clear need from within the industry.
