IT meets sustainability: Student Sema Yilmaz Named BIM Champion 2024
Sema Yilmaz is studying Building Materials Engineering at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In her Bachelor’s thesis, supervised by the Construction Management and Construction Engineering Professorship, she focused on the life cycle assessment of building materials and inevitably asked herself the question: can concrete also be sustainable? Considering the manufacturing process alone, this building material performs very poorly: the high CO2 emissions associated with cement production mean natural materials such as wood, clay or straw are increasingly taking centre stage. These materials, however, do not always possess the strength required of certain building components. Assessing the sustainability of materials therefore also requires consideration of transport routes, environmental influences, location, user requirements, service life and load-bearing capacity.
Winning project: BIM and Building Materials
Artificial intelligence and digital data models are able to predict which materials can be used to plan buildings in the most sustainable and cost-effective way. So-called Environmental Product Declarations (or EPDs) form the basis for this. EPDs describe building materials, building products or building components in terms of their environmental impact on the basis of life cycle assessments as well as their functional and technical properties. This quantitative, objective and verified information concerns the entire life cycle of the building product. EPDs are therefore fundamental for assessing the sustainability of buildings.
In her Bachelor’s thesis, Sema Yilmaz investigated how EPDs can be represented in the so-called IFC scheme. IFC stands for Industry Foundation Classes. On the basis of the open BIM concept, the data model was developed by buildingSMART to facilitate cross-software exchange of building data concerning the entire life cycle of a building. In praise of the project, jury member Timo Kretschmer of HTWK Leipzig had this to say: »The project was developed around one example – cement – but the applicability is also transferable to other building materials. In this truly and demonstrably in-depth Bachelor’s thesis, three market-standard applications were selected and used to examine the extent to which this formulated approach can already be implemented in the integration of object-related material properties«. Timo Kretschmer also emphasised the work’s intensive handling of the topics of resource conservation, sustainability and life cycle assessment – all against the backdrop of digitalisation. »This represents an important contribution to environmentally sustainable construction. Now we are looking forward to the Master’s thesis. Congratulations!«
About buildingSMART Deutschland
For almost 30 years now, buildingSMART Deutschland has been the competence network for the digitalisation of the building and real estate sectors and for open BIM. buildingSMART Deutschland has over 800 members from all areas of the building and real estate sectors, including companies, research and higher education facilities, public authorities and institutions as well as private individuals, students and trainees. They are united by a desire to help successfully shape digitalisation. To this end, buildingSMART members volunteer to develop open and manufacturer-neutral standards for digital methods and solutions and to bring these to the global level through buildingSMART International. At regional level, buildingSMART members are active in 14 regional groups and promote the widespread exchange of knowledge and experience via local and regional networks. In this way, buildingSMART works globally, nationally and regionally to develop efficient and user-friendly solutions and standards for the successful and sustainable digitalisation of the building and real estate sectors in Germany.
More information can be found at the www.buildingsmart.de website.