Discipline of Civil Engineering @ NUI Galway

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Frank Lydon Award 2009

Arup Consulting Engineers sponsor the Frank Lydon Award for the best final year project in Civil Engineering at NUI Galway. This annual award is in honour of Frank Lydon, the former chairman of the company, who was a graduate of Civil Engineering. The winning students for 2009 were Teresa Keane and Alan Kelly for their project entitled "A study on Embodied Energy in Reinforce Concrete". The project was supervised by Dr. Jamie Goggins.

Teresa and Alan's project focused on accurately calculating the embodied energy of reinforced concrete structures. The students were invited to Arup Ireland's HQ in Dublin to present their work to engineers in Arup and members of the Arup Center.

In awarding the prize, Joe Burns, Director of Arup, commented "Alan and Treasa's project is very topical in the industry that has become accutely aware of environmental issues over the past few years. The concept of embodied energy is well understood. However, the means by which it can be calulated for something with many constituent parts of a building has presented something of a challenge. Looking to the future, it is quite sunny that the amount of embodied energy will become a key issue in the design of buildings". This project demonstrates how this energy can be assessed and is a good platform from which pre-research could be undertaken in this area.

In their presentation to Arup, Treasa notes that concrete is the second most consumed product in the world after water. Consequently, investigating its embodied energy is beneficial to the development of ways for reducing it and in doing so, significantly benefitting the environment. Alan adds that "accuracy and completenss of embodied energy analysis very much is dependant on the method used. The most common methods used to calculate embodied energy in this project are evaluated and the most suitable method (the process base hybrid methid) was applied to reinforced concrete". The students created a software tool that can design, detail and schedule a slab and calculate the embodied energy in it. A case study was presented which compares the embodied energy of a typical reinforced concrete structure using two concrete mix designs. The first uses Ordinary Portland Cement, while the second uses ground granulated blas slag (GGBS) replacing half of the cement content in one of these. When compared, it is seen that the embodied energy of the GGBS mix is significantly lower (30%) than that of its counterpart.

Dr. Jamie Goggins, who was the students' supervisor on this project, believes that embodied energy evaluation should be made obligatory in the construction industry. According to Dr. Goggins, this project aims to provide readers with a knowledge of what is embodied energy, its importance within the construction industry, how it is evaluated, how it can be reduced and, in particular, the influences of each of concrete's component materials to its overall value of embodied energy."

Civil Engineering
National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway, Ireland.
Phone: +353 (0)91 524411 Ext: 2170; Fax: +353 (0) 91 494507
E-mail: Brid Flaherty
This page was last updated Friday, March 11, 2011