Sustainability assessment methods for disruptive innovations such as carbon concrete within the SFB/TRR 280

Foundations for a new way of building

The long-standing research association of RWTH Aachen University and TU Dresden has received approval from the DFG for the joint proposal “Collaborative Research Center/Transregio 280”. In this SFB/TRR with a total of 26 researchers, new construction strategies for carbon concrete are being researched in order to create the basis for the construction of the future. The aim is to find new ways of construction through carbon concrete that are specifically tailored to the properties of carbon concrete in order to replace reinforced concrete in the long term.

The core question of the subproject of the Institute of Sustainability in Civil Engineering is: How can sustainability assessment be further developed in such a way that it enables ex ante sustainability predictions to be made when researching material-minimized carbon concrete structures and can be used to evaluate disruptive innovations?

The visions and goals of the subproject of the Institute of Sustainability in Civil Engineering are

  • Development of a comprehensive methodology for the holistic assessment of all sustainability dimensions and its integration into decision-making processes
  • Further development of the assessment approaches Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (E-LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) at different scale levels with regard to the properties of disruptive innovations such as carbon concrete
  • Development of indicators and load path models in the development phase of new materials and components for an integrated sustainability index or integration model

Partner: TU Dresden, RWTH Aachen University, IPF Dresden

Period: July 2020 until June 2024 (first phase)
Funding amount: approx.12 Mio. Euro

Contact:
M.Sc. Jana Backes
Tel.: +49 241 80 22765
Mail: jana.backes@inab.rwth-aachen.de