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5.3: Exercise III- Circularity for existing buildings

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    23003

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    The brief

    The existing building stock in the Netherlands has to undergo extensive improvements, so as to meet new user or environmental requirements, from hybrid working and effective cooling to the energy transition. To reduce costs, one can adopt a circular approach to both components or materials released from existing buildings and the new components and subsystems that will be added to the buildings. Organize the following tasks for a typical Dutch single-family house:

    • Document the existing situation in a model appropriate for renovation, i.e. including realization phases, distinction between existing and planned, what should remain and what should be removed
    • Identify in the model components and materials that should be extracted (e.g. radiators: the house will switch to underfloor heating), explaining how identification takes place (preferably automatically) in the model
    • Estimate the expected circularity form for these components and materials (recycle, remanufacture, repurpose, re-use etc.), explaining which factors play a role (weathering, wear, interfacing with other elements etc.) and how these factors can be detected in the model
    • Identify which elements should be upgraded and specify what this entails in the model (paying attention to phasing and element type changes)
    • Specify how new elements (for any renovation) should be added to the model to support the above in the remaining lifecycle of the house
    • Make a time schedule for a renovation in 4D BIM

    Deliverables

    1. Process and information diagrams, accompanied by short explanatory comments
    2. Incomplete model in a BIM editor containing demonstrations of your solutions
    3. Schedules for circularity analyses in BIM

    Evaluation criteria

    1. The process diagrams should:
      1. Make all actors, stakeholders and tasks explicit
      2. Include demolition as an option, with clear feasibility criteria
      3. Include feedback loops in decision making
      4. Have no unnecessary bridges
    2. The information diagrams should:
      1. Indicate which classes of symbols and which types of properties and relations are relevant
      2. Allow to track how decisions are based to primary data
      3. Explain how circularity relates to information, e.g. which properties and relations are used to estimate it
    3. The model in BIM should contain:
      1. A clear indication of how circularity (as derivative information) is described for each symbol
      2. A reliable solution for the time dimension, e.g. phases with clear connections, including precedence
      3. An efficient way of achieving overview, e.g. identifying all similar or interconnected components in an existing or projected situation

    Roles

    If the exercise is a group assignment, consider roles for the following aspects:

    • Process management
    • Information management
    • BIM modelling
    • Analyses in BIM (using schedules – probably more than one group member)
    • Legal and technical aspects of the energy transition
    • Building documentation (emphasis on how to deal with incompleteness and uncertainty)
    • Subsystem integration
    • Circularity in design (technical aspects)

    This page titled 5.3: Exercise III- Circularity for existing buildings is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Alexander Koutamanis (TU Delft Open Textbooks) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.