Comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment of Building Materials: A Comparative LCA of Hybrid Steel/Timber Structure with Reduced Timber Design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, it has been found that the construction sector contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.To mitigate this impact, timber-based constructions have become increasingly favored due to their lightweight characteristics, expedited assembly, and environmental advantages.This research seeks to objectively validate the environmental impacts of hybrid structures through a case study building in Victoria, Canada.The focus of this study would be mainly to compare two different proposed designs for the same building.Design 1 evaluates the environmental impact of a structure predominantly composed of timber, whereas Design 2 substitutes glulam components (for instance, columns and beams) with steel elements whilst preserving a uniform floor configuration.Employing Athena software, the research quantifies the ecological footprints and determines that Design 2 exhibits a 5% elevated Global Warming Potential in comparison to Design 1.The results showed that Design 1, which contains a greater mass of timber, performed better across the entire life cycle of the project.The most significant difference between the two designs is at the beyond-building life stage (D), where Design 1 is projected to recover 197,000 kg CO₂ eq more than Design 2. These results indicate the necessity for further investigation into optimized hybrid structures that balance carbon reduction, resource efficiency, and long-term sustainability within the construction sector.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".