Infrastructure engineering software company Bentley Systems has just released its new iTwin carbon assessment tools. Announced during the recent Environment Analyst Global Business Summit in Chicago, these capabilities will enable infrastructure professionals seamlessly to quantify carbon reduction opportunities in their projects.
How it works
These iTwin carbon assessment tools leverage Bentley’s iTwin Experience, a relatively new cloud product that allows owner-operators to visualize and navigate digital twins online. This is combined with EC3, an embodied carbon-in-construction calculator tool, developed by the nonprofit Building Transparency.
Embodied carbon impact calculation from EC3 visualized in iTwin Experience. Color codes represent the severity of realized embodied carbon. Image: Bentley Systems.
Consequently, this combination enables engineers to explore multiple design choices more quickly, whilst eliminating manual data exports. As a result, these new iTwin carbon assessment tools, enable infrastructure professionals fully to automate embodied carbon calculation reports and impact analyses. Bentley Systems Director of Product Management, Kaustubh Page explains:
“Lifecycle assessments, environmental footprint analyses, and reports are becoming standard requirements for infrastructure projects worldwide. Designers and environmental engineers spend critical time generating environmental assessments or reports. Because the required data needed to be manually exported from multiple design authoring tools and then aggregated and verified, generating these environmental assessments has been a time-consuming and potentially error-prone process.
“With these new capabilities built into iTwin Experience, it is feasible to transform what is typically a six-month process into a six-minute workflow. Our goal is for iTwin Experience users to spend their valuable time on designing, optimizing, and making better decisions, faster – not exporting, aggregating, and validating data.”
History
In 2022, Bentley developed an integration service within the iTwin Platform. As a result it enabled the automation of generating embodied carbon reports for infrastructure projects via One Click LCA (a life cycle assessment application) and EC3. Now iTwin Experience provides a ready-to-go, bi-directional integration with EC3. This enables users to visualize carbon assessments in a digital twin, without the need to write code.
Moreover, iTwin Experience exports a data model to EC3, a free tool for which users need to register separately. This performs the embodied carbon calculations and returns results that iTwin Experience seamlessly reads and visualizes.
Testing
Employee-owned architecture and engineering firm Burns & MacDonnell is currently testing Bentley’s iTwin-powered carbon reporting capabilities. Its Design Technology Director, Mark Tablante, outlines its progress so far, “Electrification is a critical component to meeting the world’s decarbonization goals.”
Tablante continued, “There is a tremendous amount of capital investment needed in electric T&D infrastructure and a carbon-efficient design makes the most of every dollar spent to further decarbonization. Tracking and reporting on progress toward utilities’ net zero goals is important to not only their shareholders, but for the future of our world. Burns & McDonnell is working with Bentley to test their new iTwin-powered carbon reporting capabilities for the electric utility industry.”
Rodrigo Fernandes, Director of ES(D)G (empowering sustainable development goals) within Bentley Systems added, “We want to enable users to implement carbon analysis and optimization as a natural, repeatable, and standardized procedure, as part of managing every type of infrastructure project, anywhere in the world. The sooner that carbon assessment is integrated into an infrastructure project, the bigger the carbon reduction opportunities will be.”
Consequently, digital twins are becoming crucial for carbon assessment and decarbonizing infrastructure. They do so by ensuring accurate carbon assessment and optimization throughout a project’s lifecycle. Consequently this has to start in the early design stages.
Bentley’s new iTwin Experience combined with EC3 and One Click LCA provides excellent iTwin carbon assessment tools. Consequently, these will enable owner-operators and their supply chains to visualize, analyze, manage, and share infrastructure digital twin data, sourced from various systems.
Availability
The aforementioned capabilities are only currently only available in Preview. Moreover, for the time being, they will only be available for a restricted number of partners and early adopters.
About Bentley Systems (Nasdaq: BSY)
Headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania, USA, Bentley Systems Incorporated is a software company. It develops, manufactures, licenses, sells, and supports computer software and services for the design, construction, and operation of infrastructure. Meanwhile, it generates annual revenue of approximately USD 1 billion in 194 countries. Currently, it employs more than 5,000 people.
Moreover, users deploy Bentley software for the design, construction, and operations of roads and bridges, rail and transit, water and wastewater. Engineers also use it for public works and utilities, buildings and campuses, mining, industrial facilities, and of course carbon assessment. Its product range includes:-
- AssetWise for asset and network performance.
- iTwin Platform for infrastructure digital twins.
- MicroStation-based applications for modeling and simulation.
- ProjectWise for project delivery.
- Seequent’s leading geo professional software portfolio.
- SYNCHRO for construction management.
The trademarks listed above all belong to Bentley Systems Incorporated or one of its subsidiaries. Meanwhile, all other brands and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.
- For more information concerning Bentley Systems, please click here.
- To learn more about Bentley’s iTwin embodied carbon assessment, please click here.
- And an interesting video of iTwin embodied carbon reporting in action is available here.
