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Tools

Last modified by Iwona Budny Bjergø on 2024/02/05 12:30

Contents

Carbon footprint assessment

The assessment and disclosure of the CO2 footprint in engineering design play a key role in promoting sustainability. By quantifying project-related carbon emissions, engineers can make informed decisions to minimize environmental impact, optimize resource use, and create greener, more eco-friendly and more energy-efficient solutions.

As regulations in certain countries mandate the disclosure of the CO2 emissions associated with a structure, FEM-Design 23 introduces a new tool (located in Tools > Quantity estimation) that provides a detailed list and summary of the CO2 emissions associated with different material types, material qualities, structure types, and building storeys.

The Quantity estimation tool have been supplemented with

  • a new CO2 Footprint column for each material type table, and
  • a new summary table called Total, which allows you to aggregate the CO2 footprint of all objects within the project based on various criteria.

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The calculation of CO2 emissions is based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), precisely relying on the Environmental Impact Indicator (EII) values assigned to various stages (A1-A3). These stages include the production of individual material qualities from the procurement of raw materials through the manufacturing to delivery of the final product. So, the CO2 footprint value for an element is determined by summing the EII values of the product for all relevant stages (A1-A3) and then multiplying this sum by the mass of the element.

To assign EII values to specific material qualities, you can use the new CO2 footprint database tool (Tools menu). By default, FEM-Design associates recommended EII values from the Swedish Boverkets climate database with the default material library qualities. However, you have the flexibility to modify these assignments or introduce new material qualities. For each material type, you can associate a selected default material quality. Its EII value will be applied to unmapped material qualities. The EII-material quality associations you provide can be saved for future projects using the Settings functions.

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At each Quantity estimation table, one can summarize the CO2 footprint data by: Storeys, Material types, Structure types, Identifier Names, and Quality.

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The Quantity estimation tables, including the new CO2 footprint data, can be listed to the clipboard, printer, and FEM-Design Documentation (using the List function).

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Automatic label arrangement

In a FEM-Design project, numerous object labels and numeric result values can be displayed in the graphical windows of the model views or the documentation. To ensure that these labels are all easily readable, the following new features are available (in the Tools menu):

  • New tool for automatic arrangement of labels (Arrange labels), designed to prevent selected labels from overlapping
  • Enhanced automatic sorting of numerical result values (Auto arrange all numeric values) to align with labels, ensuring they do not overlap with the labels

The figure below illustrates the outcome of automatic label and numeric value alignments. The extreme values of bar displacements are highlighted in red, while the bar identification labels are displayed in colours characteristic of cross-sectional types (set with Tools > Colour schema).

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