Life Cycle Assessment of ZERAF: Quantifying Carbon Footprint and Life-Cycle Costs

This report presents the life-cycle environmental and economic assessment of ZERAF, an adaptive opaque façade technology designed to reduce building energy demand through dynamic thermal modulation of the building envelope. A methodological framework is developed to compare ZERAF with conventional façade and building-system solutions using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), circularity metrics and building-performance indicators over a 50-year period.

The study evaluates complete building-level intervention packages for new construction, deep retrofit and minor retrofit scenarios across seven representative European climates. Results for the single-family-house archetype show that ZERAF consistently achieves the lowest operational carbon emissions among new-construction and deep-retrofit solutions, reducing heating demand by up to 88%, cooling demand by up to 50%, and operational carbon emissions by up to 19%. ZERAF also demonstrates strong circularity performance.

While higher embodied impacts and investment costs currently limit whole-life environmental and economic performance, alternative material configurations indicate substantial improvement potential, with embodied carbon reductions of up to 58% and embodied cost reductions of up to 75%. Overall, the results confirm the effectiveness of ZERAF's adaptive principle and identify key directions for further optimisation.