Date of Award
2026
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering
Department
Civil and Environmental Engineering
First Advisor
Vinka Oyanedel-Craver
Abstract
The building sector accounts for a significant share of global greenhouse gas emissions, with embodied impacts gaining importance as operational efficiency improves. Modular construction is frequently proposed as a lower-impact alternative to conventional site-built methods, yet reported findings remain inconsistent, and no comparative study of student housing was identified in the reviewed literature. This thesis compares the embodied environmental impacts of two student housing developments at the University of Rhode Island: the New University Housing Project (NUHP), a hybrid development combining a site-built concrete and steel podium with a factory-built volumetric timber module superstructure, and Brookside Hall, a conventional site-built steel, precast, and masonry building. Standing directly adjacent on the same campus, serving the same student-housing function, and developed within a few years of one another, the two buildings form a rare closely matched pair of realized projects. Comparisons of this kind in the literature typically require either hypothetical reference designs, with their attendant assumptions, or considerably less similar real buildings.
Life cycle inventories were developed for both buildings directly from project documentation and modeled in Brightway2 using the ecoinvent 3.8 cutoff database within a cradle-to-installation (A1-A5) system boundary. Impacts were assessed using the ReCiPe Midpoint (H) method, with Global Warming Potential (GWP) as the primary indicator, normalized per student bed and per square meter of gross floor area. Contribution, sensitivity, scenario, and Monte Carlo uncertainty analyses were performed to identify impact drivers and test robustness.
Material production (A1-A3) dominates embodied impacts for both buildings, accounting for approximately 84-86% of GWP. Normalized per bed, NUHP shows approximately 44% lower GWP than Brookside Hall, with consistent advantages across all supplementary categories. Normalized per square meter of gross floor area, the advantage narrows to approximately 33%. Concrete-related processes account for roughly half of the conventional building's per-bed GWP, while NUHP's site-built podium, foundations, and cores contribute nearly half of its whole-building GWP despite comprising a single occupied story and the project's vertical cores.
Sensitivity analyses do not alter the comparative ranking, and Monte Carlo simulation shows non-overlapping uncertainty ranges, with NUHP yielding lower per-bed GWP in all sampled iterations. Most of NUHP's advantage traces to its structural material substitution, timber in place of concrete and steel across five of its six stories, rather than to off-site fabrication itself; because the modular and timber choices coincide in this single case-study comparison, their individual contributions cannot be separated. The findings indicate that shifting to less carbon-intensive structural materials, delivered here through modular production, can substantially reduce embodied impacts per unit of housing capacity, while functional unit selection, floor area per bed, and podium design decisively shape the magnitude of the observed advantage.
Recommended Citation
Franzen, Lasse, "ASSESSING MODULAR AND CONVENTIONAL CONSTRUCTION FOR SUSTAINABLE STUDENT HOUSING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND: A LIFE CYCLE APPROACH" (2026). Open Access Master's Theses. Paper 2753.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/theses/2753