University of Cambridge
Engineering

The pressing challenge of climate change makes the need for a sustainable built environment ever more crucial. With the construction industry currently accounting for 37% of carbon emissions, substantial progress is still required. The UK’s 2050 Net Zero target has focused the attention of the engineering community on reducing the energy used for the operation of buildings, such as in cooling and heating systems, while the energy associated with their development (encompassing the production of materials, transportation to site, and assembly) has received less attention. The latter, known as embodied energy, accounts for 13% of the total carbon emissions, with this figure set to rise as the operational carbon emissions reduce in line with the 2050 Net Zero target.

More than 150 years ago, Brunel had already a keen awareness of such environmental impacts, as revealed from his private letters. One of his landmark projects, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, serves as a good example where he took great care to reduce the material needed for its development. This approach of material efficiency remains pivotal today in addressing environmental issues in construction.

Drawing from Brunel’s legacy, this research aims at providing the knowledge base, methods, and tools required for achieving material efficiency and reducing the embodied energy and carbon in buildings without compromising structural safety. Current design methods imply a level of safety that is usually exceeded in design, resulting in more material being used. By examining the fundamental question of how much safety is necessary and connecting it to the efficient design of buildings, this project will develop a design optimisation framework to underpin material efficiency. This framework, along with a new machine learning model, will be integrated into a plug-in for commonly used structural analysis software. Unlike existing tools, the proposed tool will be easy to propagate into engineering workflows, thanks to its compatibility with popular software used in industry and its computational efficiency. Ultimately, the fellowship outputs will provide the basis for updating design standards, and enable significant embodied energy and carbon reductions, paving the way for a safe and more sustainable built environment.