• environmental impact
• Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions
• recovery stage
• shock deterioration
• Stochastic Life-Cycle Assessment

The modern design of engineering systems should be based on multidisciplinary considerations. Recent studies have focused on separately evaluating different performance measures of engineering systems. Decisions made in structural design may have long term impact on the sustainability and resilience of the system. The building sector accounts for a significant part of the primary energy consumption and is responsible for a large part of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions all over the world. Furthermore, engineering systems have several stages in their life-cycle, which include construction, usage, demolition and recovery. Different activities/processes in each stage contribute to the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. It is essential to consider the environmental impacts of different structural designs.
This thesis is addressed to a Stochastic Life-Cycle Assessment as a formulation to assess, in stochastic way, the environmental impact of an engineering system in terms of its carbon footprint, embodied energy, and energy consumption during its entire service life. It considers the ability of the engineering systems to resist a hazard. The proposed formulation is conceived to take into account shock and gradual deteriorations in the engineering system, estimating the GHG emissions due to possible repair or reconstruction after damage.
The proposed formulation is applied for two case studies. The first case study assesses the environmental impact of a four-story reinforced concrete (RC) office building, located in a highly seismic region in the United States. In this example two different seismic design levels are considered for comparison and the obtained results show the trade-off between environmental impact and hazard resistance. The second case study assesses the environmental impact of a four-story masonry residential building, located in a seismic region in Italy.
The entire research activity has been made possible in the context of a collaboration between the University of Pisa (Dept. of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction Engineering) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Newmark Laboratory- Dept. of Civil Environmental Engineering).