Australian invention revolutionises building industry
Australian invention revolutionises building industry
A new "Green calculator" is due to transform the building and construction industry because it can provide property professionals with an instant cost and environmental assessment of any commercial building straight from its 3D computer graphics.
The world-first LCADesign, developed in the Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation will hopefully do the same for the family home, roads, sewage networks or any major construction project in the future.
The leader of the development team, Dr. Peter Newton of CSIRO says: "Working from the 3-dimensional CAD design for a building, the calculator provides an instant display of the volume and cost of all the materials involved in its construction - at the push of a button.
"At the same time, it can calculate the environmental impact of all those materials - how many tonnes of clay were used to make them, how much water, how much energy, and how much greenhouse gas and other polluting emissions they made to air, land or water."
The technology will provide builders, for the first time, with the opportunity to instantly redesign or re-specify materials for a building based on both the economic and environmental cost of the materials involved in its construction.
Dr Newtown added that the calculator will be linked in real-time to a constantly-updated index of the prices of more than 800 key building materials - concrete, brick, steel, aluminium, glass, timber, and tiles - to obtain an instant read-out of the cost of alternatives.
It also helps the builder to select those materials which have the least environmental impact over their lifetime: "You can see the 'environmental footprint' for the whole building over the lifetime of the materials it embodies. This allows the builder to choose materials which are most effective over their service life, both economically and environmentally.
"It's a genuine world-first - and we're seeing real interest in it from the North American construction industry where there is currently nothing equivalent. It is also likely to revolutionise the profession of quantity surveying."
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