Design for disassembly as an alternative sustainable construction approach to life-cycle-design of concrete buildings

authored by: Wasim Rida Salama
supervised by: Alexander Furche
Abstract: Concrete buildings suffer from a disconcerting end-of-life scenario that is dominating by the demolition processes. The demolition not only prevents from reuse of the building elements and components but also contaminates the environment by dust, noise and solid waste. It also causes several kinds of disturbance to the site and its surroundings. This in addition to other non-preferable aspects is caused due to the ignorance of the life-cycle design of concrete buildings. While steel and timber buildings can be easily disassembled and removed, concrete buildings - especially those made from cast-in-situ concrete - have no options except demolition. To move concrete buildings to a higher level of construction sustainability and architectural adaptability the construction of concrete buildings should consider the design for disassembly (DfD). In this case concrete building elements and components can be disassembled and recovered by reuse or recycled or can be changed or replaced. Many benefits could be obtained from designing buildings for disassembly. It has been approved that DfD provides the buildings with high transformation capacity that leads to a higher sustainability; it also turns the linear life-cycle model of buildings to a more cyclic one. A review of the previous successful attempts to dismantle concrete buildings - and reuse some of its elements - has shown that despite the complexity of the work and a percentage of material loss precast concrete systems still have promising aspects. This study aims to consider DfD of concrete buildings from an architectural construction point of view. Through exploration and revision of the current issues related to the concrete technologies and their role in building, assembly and disassembly as well as DfD aspects, theories and guidelines. Based on that a comprehensive analysis of the current used architectural precast systems and elements has been carried out. The results of the analysis have been utilized to identify areas of weakness that may cause loss of time or material through the assembly and disassembly processes. The enclosure system of the concrete buildings then has been chosen for development of systems to have high disassembly potential by introducing some concepts and improvements. These developments have led to façade systems that support reuse, change, replacement, update and adaptability. The developed façade systems have been evaluated and proved to be sustainable with regard to their environmental impact by achieving high values for seventeen determining factors of eight DfD aspects. A part of the study has been didicated to the application and modeling through a case study. This case study has been explored analyzed and developed to guarantee the successful implementiation of the developed system in buildings and to provide a complete picture regarding their application. At the end, the study was able to reposition the concrete buildings in the context of cradle-to-cradle design, analyzes their elements and systems with regard to their transformation capacity and to provide concepts of development that move DfD of concrete buildings from theories to practice.
Organisation(s): Load-Bearing Structures Section
Type: Doctoral thesis
No. of pages: 243
Publication date: 2019
Publication status: Published
Sustainable Development Goals: SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production
Electronic version(s): https://doi.org/10.15488/5121 (Access: Open)