Renovation-innovator: development of sustainable building systems for renovation.

The construction sector faces an important challenge in order to achieve the European objectives concerning sustainability and energy consumption. Important priorities are energy-efficient newly built houses and thorough renovations of the existing housing stock. As the amount of newly built houses is limited compared to the existing buildings, renovation plays a major role in achieving these European objectives. Recent and ongoing research in Europe related to sustainable renovation mainly focuses on improving the energy performance of buildings. An integral sustainability analysis is missing. A screening of current practices in Flanders confirms this and shows that renovations are often limited to small interventions, whereby a long term vision is missing.

The objective of this PhD research is to support the construction sector in the challenge for an increased renovation rate with more in depth transformations of the existing housing stock in Flanders. Moreover, the research aims to stimulate an evolution from energy renovations towards integral sustainable renovations from a life cycle perspective. Therefore, the research goals are (1) to develop a number of affordable and innovative ‘open-renovation-systems’, with the focus on interventions such as splitting, combining, wrapping and extending residential buildings, (2) to develop a quantitative method to evaluate the environmental and financial impact of the renovation interventions, based on a life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) approach and (3) to develop a supporting framework for the development of innovative renovation systems for industrial construction partners. To reach these objectives, a combination of design-oriented and analytical research will be used.