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In June 2022, PhD student Yang Zhang of the Department of Civil Engineering and supervised by Professor Wei Pan, was awarded the Best Student Paper of the Congress and the Best Paper Award in the category ‘Smart and Sustainable Buildings and Cities’ at the World Building Congress (WBC) held by the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction in Melbourne, Australia. The WBC is a major conference in the built environment disciplines. 

Yang’s research focuses on modular integrated construction (MiC) and life cycle embodied carbon assessment. The awarded paper, entitled “Reducing embodied carbon emissions of concrete modules in high-rise buildings through structural design optimisation”, addresses an important aspect of MiC, which is an innovative approach of building promoted in the Policy Address. The paper proposes a novel low carbon module design method integrating the module design, structural safety check and embodied carbon (EC) assessment, achieving up to 27% EC reduction of a concrete module among different designs. The findings reveal a significant potential of EC reduction in concrete modules through structural design optimisation, providing a new direction for achieving low carbon modular buildings in the construction industry. 

The paper is co-authored by Professor Pan and Dr. Yue Teng and funded by the General Research Fund and the Collaborative Research Fund of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.