Advanced exergoenvironmental assessment of a building from the primary energy transformation to the environment

Buildings are of great importance in terms of consumption of energy all over the world. Building sector has a significant influence over the total natural resource consumption and is significant contributors of greenhouse gases. Exergy-based methods in assessing the performance of buildings have become very popular in recent years. In this context, conventional exergoenvironmental methods include exergy and life cycle analysis and are considered to be very reliable to evaluate environmental impacts of any system. Advanced exergoenvironmental analysis is a combination of advanced exergy analysis and life cycle assessment. This study deals with determining the environmental effects of a building heating system at various stages. Advanced exergoenvironmental method is applied to the system from the primary energy transformation to the environment. Using advanced exergoenvironmental analysis relations, between the components and the stages (endogenous, exogenous parts), the improvement potentials (avoidable and unavoidable parts) and the advanced exergoenvironmental rates for the system stages are determined. A parametric study is undertaken to investigate effects of the environment temperature on exergy destruction rates and the environment temperature on efficiencies. Based on the environmental temperature, a sensitivity analysis is also performed for exergy destruction rates and efficiencies. Results show that the exogenous environmental impact of the system is 68.6% while the avoidable exergoenvironmental impact is only 7%. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.