Sustainable design model for analysis of relationships among building height, CO2 emissions, and cost of core walls in office buildings in Korea

A shear wall is a vertical member with a relatively large volume that is used frequently as a vertical passage and a lateral load support system in every building without exception. Many studies have been conducted on the sustainable design of buildings, but few have studied the sustainable design of shear walls considering CO2 emissions. Herein, a sustainable design model for shear walls is developed to analyze the relationship between building height, CO2 emissions, and construction cost. The model is applied to the sustainable design of shear walls installed in a 42-story mixed-use building. The characteristics in the change in CO2 emissions and the construction cost according to the building height were analyzed using the slenderness ratio as a variable. The results indicated that as the slenderness ratio increased, the CO2 emissions increased almost linearly in proportion to the height. In particular, when the slenderness ratio increased from 4.40 to 4.93, which is known to be the limit of the efficient applicability of shear walls, the CO2 emissions tended to increase more rapidly. When the slenderness ratio was 4.93, the CO2 emissions for the shear wall were reduced to 27.24% by the proposed model. •CO2 emission optimization model for building with shear walls is presented.•Relationships between building height and CO2 emissions as well as building height and cost of shear walls are investigated.•CO2 emissions increased almost linearly in proportion to the change in building.•When the slenderness ratio increased about to 5.0, CO2 emissions tended to increase more rapidly.