• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Engineering Designer Magazine

Engineering Designer

  • Home
  • Technology
  • Education
  • Sustainability
  • Materials
  • Medical
  • Construction
  • Advertise
  • iED
You are here: Home / Construction / Making building trusses more environmentally friendly

Making building trusses more environmentally friendly

December 8, 2021 by Geordie Torr

Architects and engineers will be better able to design truss structures in a way that minimises their embodied carbon thanks to a new set of computational tools developed by researchers at MIT.

A material or structure’s ‘embodied carbon’ factors in all of the carbon emitted during its production and use, including, for example, that from the fuel used for mining and smelting steel, or for felling and processing trees and in transporting the material to a site.

Advertisement

Truss structures – crisscross arrays of diagonal struts used for support in construction – are typically made of steel or wood or a combination of both. While in general wood has much less embodied carbon, using steel in places where its properties can provide maximum benefit can result in a smaller overall carbon footprint. 

The MIT researchers carried out a detailed analysis of the different, often competing, factors involved and then created a set of computational tools that can be used to minimise the embodied carbon in truss structures while maintaining all of the properties required for a given building application. The tools can be applied at different stages, either in the early planning phase of a structure, or later on in the final stages of a design.

Advertisement

‘Construction is a huge greenhouse gas emitter that has kind of been flying under the radar for the past decades,’ said Josephine Carstensen, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT. However, building designers ‘are starting to be more focused on how to not just reduce the operating energy associated with building use, but also the important carbon associated with the structure itself.’

The two main options for reducing the carbon emissions associated with truss structures are substituting materials or changing the structure. But according to the researchers, there has been ‘surprisingly little work’ on tools to help designers figure out strategies for minimising emissions in a given situation.

Advertisement

The new system utilises a technique known as topology optimisation, in which a set of basic parameters, such as the amount of load to be supported and the dimensions of the structure, are used to produce designs that have been optimised for different characteristics, such as weight, cost, or, in this case, embodied carbon.

Using the optimisation tools to reengineer several trusses, the team demonstrated that an embodied carbon reduction of at least ten per cent was possible with no loss of performance. However, according to Carstensen, those estimates are ‘not exactly apples to apples’ and the savings could actually be two to three times greater.

‘It’s about choosing materials more smartly,’ Carstensen said. ‘There’s a big interest in the construction industry in mass timber structures and this speaks right into that area. So, the hope is that this would make inroads into the construction business and actually make a dent in that very large contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.’

Advertisement

The tools aren’t ready for commercial use as the researchers have yet to design a user interface.

The research has been published in Engineering Structures.

Filed Under: Construction, Sustainability

Primary Sidebar

SUBSCRIBE And get a FREE Magazine

Want a FREE magazine each and every month jam-packed with the latest engineering and design news, views and features?

ED Update Magazine

Simply let us know where to send it by entering your name and email below. Immediate access.

Trending

Engineering student team wins People’s Prize in global design competition

Tiny new laser can measure objects at ultrafast rates

New methodology for 3D braiding machine design unveiled

Sellafield engineers win IChemE Young Engineers awards

Novel green hydrogen production pilot launched in Australia

Foster + Partners to design national memorial to Queen Elizabeth II

Royal Academy of Engineering announces new inclusivity webinar

PTC integrates supply chain risk assessments into its PLM platform

AI can create climate-friendly cement recipes in seconds

Big Bang Competition winners announced

Footer

About Engineering Designer

Engineering Designer is the quarterly journal of the Insitution of Engineering Designers.

It is produced by the IED for our Members and for those who have an interest in engineering and product design, as well as CAD users.

Click here to learn more about the IED.

Other Pages

  • Contact us
  • About us
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms
  • Institution of Engineering Designers

Search

Tags

ied

Copyright © 2025 · Site by Syon Media