Expert Graphs (Annual Impacts, Sankey, Spidergram & Stacked Columns)

What do the Expert Graphs provide you?

The Annual Impacts graph shows the annual carbon impacts or annual cost impacts (when using a life cycle costing tool) over the set calculation period of your project.

The Spidergram graph gives you results which are grouped by classification element breakdown. Each radial in the Spidergram is an impact category.

The Life-cycle impacts as stacked columns give you the life-cycle impacts per indicator by stage in single columns. The availability of emissions and stages depends on the tool in which you use this graph. 

The Sankey diagram shows the flow of materials throughout your project. The flow goes from the life-cycle stage to the classifications into the resource types and or subtypes.

Sankey diagrams show by default three levels. You can adjust the rendering and add resource sub-types to the rendering. The classification will automatically apply the national classification, for example, RICS, MasterFormat, and so on, as long as that classification is applied to the input data. The full data set for the Sankey diagram can also be downloaded in Excel format.

How do you use the Expert Graphs?

If you have a project with a tool that supports either of these graphs, all you need to do is input data to the project. These graphs will populate automatically based on the data available for your project.

Annual Impacts

Navigate to the results page and scroll almost all the way down, there you will find the annual impacts chart. Most of the time the section with the highest impact will be the A1-A3 (the materials used in the construction of your project).

For the chart below we have used a BREEAM tool as an example (with a calculation period of 60 years), so it might display other life cycle stages which are not reported in other tools. The A1-A3, A4 and A5 emissions will always happen at the beginning of the calculation period of your project. Throughout the calculation period, there will be the annual consumption of energy (B6) and water (B7). Furthermore, any materials which are replaced (B4-B5) during the life cycle/calculation period of your building will be shown in the B1-B5 category. Any use phase emissions are also attributed to the B1-B5 section. Any annually exported energy (D2) will be displayed next to the energy usage. Lastly, the End-of-life emissions will be shown in year 61 when the building is demolished.

All of the graphs can also be downloaded by clicking on the 'Download as image' button.

If you want to reach up on what the different life cycle stages mean, please check the following article: Life Cycle Stages

Annual impacts chart

 

You can also take out several factors if you do not want to compare them, for that simply click on the category legend and you will get a different type of graph, in the example below we excluded the A1-A3 emissions to get a clearer overview of the replacements, annual energy and water usage and end of life emissions.

Annual emissions without A1-A3

Spidergram

In the spidergram, the user can customize the classifications of all inputs and get results to be grouped accordingly. As mentioned before, each radial represents an impact category.

Life-cycle impacts by stage as stacked columns

Sankey Diagram

Navigate to the 'Results' page of your project and you will see the Sankey Diagram above the LCA results section.

Step 1: Configure your chart. 

By default, the chart will select the life-cycle stages, classifications and resource types. You can also select the resource sub-types, change the number of decimals and choose what you want to display.

Step 1: Configure your chart

Step 2: Analyse and download the results

See the Sankey Diagram that generated and download the results in the desired format. 

Download the results of the Sankey Diagram

 

Example 1: Sankey Diagram with basic settings

Example 1: Sankey Diagram with basic settings.

Example 2: Sankey Diagram with resource subtypes and scheme-specific classification

Example 2: Sankey Diagram with resource subtypes and scheme-specific classifications