The University of Oxford has joined the ZEBAI project, a major new initiative that aims to revolutionise the way in which zero-emission buildings are designed. The project, which has received €3.8million in funding from the European Commission Horizon Programme, will establish demonstrator projects in four countries to test innovative approaches to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of buildings.
The building and construction sector is a major source of carbon emissions, accounting for more than 34 per cent of energy demand and around 37 per cent of energy and process-related CO2 emissions in 2021, according to the UN Environment Programme. Currently, the sector is far off-track from decarbonising by 2050, presenting an urgent need to adopt low-carbon materials and building processes.
Led by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, ZEBAI will address this by bringing together a consortium of 18 academic institutes from seven European countries. The Departments of Engineering Science and Physics at Oxford will focus on characterising and modelling how materials respond to temperature and mechanical forces, harnessing the power of AI to select locally sourced building materials that are suited to specific environmental conditions. In particular, they will study the specific properties of building materials and how they behave under the combined influence of different forces in order to reveal how they’re likely to be affected by changes in temperature and loads or stresses.
The departments’ analysis of the mechanical properties of materials used in buildings across Europe will be used to create a simulation that will be integrated with AI methodologies so that the resulting software can be incorporated into construction design platforms used by architects and engineers. ZEBAI software will include a large library of properties of materials based on their work and will be used to ensure that constructions meet net-zero targets.
Professors Sonia Antoranz Contera (Department of Physics) and Antoine Jérusalem (Engineering Science) will work with Lurtis Ltd to integrate AI modelling into the material selection process.
‘This is a very timely and exciting project where the work that Professor Contera and I are doing with engineering materials at multiple scales will feed into direct practice to maximise impact in the real world,’ said Professor Jérusalem. ‘ZEBAI is poised to push forward the frontier of energy-efficiency in future constructions with the state-of-the-art of mechanics and AI.’
The research done at Oxford will contribute to the project’s core goals of optimising materials for different environments, streamlining the design process to make it more efficient and user-friendly, and ensuring both cost effectiveness and environmental objectives are achieved.
ZEBAI aims to revolutionize zero-emission buildings design through a comprehensive methodology that will incorporate analyses, decision-making processes and holistic evaluations of energy performance, environmental impact, indoor environmental quality and cost-effectiveness. This approach promises more efficient and user-friendly design processes and the potential to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of future buildings.
Furthermore, the project will develop a database of well-characterised materials and assess the differences between predicted and actual building performance. AI techniques will play a pivotal role in optimising the selection of materials and systems across various aspects of building design. By integrating AI-assisted processes, the project aims to enhance the efficiency and user-friendliness of the design process, all while adhering to environmental quality and cost-effectiveness objectives.
The four representative demonstrators in the Ukraine, Spain, the UK and the Netherlands will serve as test cases, allowing the project team to assess the methodology’s performance across different climates, usages and building patterns.