SET Proceedings 2978-4387 Caravel Press 10.65582/set.2012.004 2012.004 Lifecycle Energy Analysis of a Typical Office Building Block in Mexico-Warm and Humid Climate KashkooliAli M.S. VargasGloria A. AltanHasim School of Architecture, The University of Sheffield, Arts Tower, Western Bank, Sheffield, UK 02092012 11 1 978-1-995850-02-3 30 39 2 September 2012 © 2012 Copyright WSSET 2012

Undeniably, the huge increase of the general demand for energy to run the human activities has provided a challenge to improve energy efficiency in all levels of human life. The Building Lifecycle Assessment (BLCA) has initiated development of lots of new tools as well as the methodologies to calculate the rate of energy consumption in all phases of buildings’ construction, service-life, and disposal. The prospective BLCA methodologies have been developed into several programmes to simulate the buildings pre construction in order to reduce the waste of energy. However, the results of these methodologies are not very accurate and reliable for building design and decision-making. These are also mostly designed for developed countries without any flexibility to serve the developing countries.This study adopts a new simplified semi-quantitative BLCA methodology developed in the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, to calculate energy (embodied, operational and total energy) for typical Mexican office-building blocks. In terms of operational energy, the method is benefitting from the use of external software called HAP (Hourly Analysis Programme), which was developed by ‘Carrier’ company.The results will reveal the advantages of the new semi-quantitative BLCA methodology and its capability of adaptation with the local programmes in calculation of overall energy; Moreover, it highlights both sensitivity and credibility of the outputs in comparison with the existing BLCA methodologies because of its flexibility with the use of updatable database and aiding from other local programmes. This methodology can be applied by designers, investors, and stakeholders in the building and construction industries to shortlist the best building alternatives in terms of materials and services.

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