Research on the relationship between microclimate and heritage buildings or historic buildings has increased dramatically in the last few decades. Research has focused on indoor climate or indoor ...microclimate or the environment or micro-environment, and the field of these studies regards several variables, physical—air temperature, air speed, relative humidity—or chemical, dust, CO2, pollution, etc., all of which can have an effect or damage buildings or artifacts inside buildings. Moreover, all these variables should be monitored in a monitoring campaign following the standard EN 15757; in spite of this, scientific literature contains mistakes with regard to the words and objects of study. In this short contribution, the author proposes a common nomenclature in the research field of climate and microclimate in heritage buildings and heritage artifacts. A new nomenclature should be useful for the community of heritage scientists working on preventive measures to distinguish between climate and environment, or the object of study, e.g., the room (wall, wood structure, fresco, etc.) where the artifacts are or the air around them (painting, canvas, statue, piece of furniture, documents, books, etc.).
Adaptive façades represent a viable and effective technological solution to reduce the building energy demand for cooling while achieving interesting aesthetic effects on the building envelope to ...screen solar radiation. During the last decade, many different design solutions, including those based on shape memory alloys, have been experimented to obtain appropriate responses without being dependent on electro-mechanically actuated systems. Several recent and ongoing studies have been published in the scientific literature regarding the different actuator typologies, as well as the different properties of the materials used, which usually determine the adaptive solution characteristics after a series of complex and time-consuming simulations using specialised dynamic modelling software. Due to the time and resources required, this kind of evaluation is usually delivered during the last and more advanced design stage as a form of assessment of already-taken architectural and technological choices. The study reported in the paper aims to offer a quick, time-saving simplified algorithm to calculate the response of an adaptive façade, according to the ISO 13790 standards, to be adopted during the early design stage to evaluate the possible effects of design decisions. The study includes three main steps: (a) the conceptualisation of the adaptive solution considering the context conditions; (b) the definition of the calculation algorithm; (c) the application of the method to a test room in a case study building located in Bologna for supporting the discussion of the related outcomes.
The work presented here investigates the risk of interstitial condensation between the existing masonry and the insulation using several materials and evaluates the water content inside the ...insulation (WCI) through various simulations in dynamic mode onto existing buildings located in different countries in Europe. The insulation materials considered are specifically: natural fibre materials, mineral fibre materials, and artificial materials. The scenarios were chosen considering different climate zones, according to the Köppen climate classification, and the analysed buildings were taken from the TABULA database in the years of construction from 1945 to 1969. The building typologies are single-family houses, where in each building system the insulation was placed towards the warm side with a fixed thickness of 5 cm. The simulations concerned: (a) the application scenario, (b) the type of stratigraphy chosen, and (c) the exposure of the existing building system. The outputs generated by the simulations provided the data to determine in which type of building, depending on the insulating materials, interstitial condensation is formed or not. It is shown that only for the climate zones of the cities of Oslo and Brussels, associated with their building typologies, for the insulating materials: mineral and natural, is there the formation of interstitial condensation
Huge efforts have been made in recent decades to improve energy saving in the building sector, particularly focused on the role of façades. Among the explored viable solutions, climate-adaptive ...building shells CABS consider promising solutions to control solar radiation, both in terms of illuminance and heating levels, but are still piloting these solutions due to their complex designs and necessary costs. The present study aims to provide a speedy but reliable methodology to evaluate the potential impacts of adopting active/passive CABS systems during the preliminary design stage. The proposed methodology allows the evaluation and comparison, when multiple options are considered, of the effects of each solution in terms of the energy needs, thermal comfort and lighting, while reducing the required effort and time for an extensive analysis of the overall building level. This is based on the use of a “virtual test room” where different conditions and configurations can be explored. A case study in the city of Bologna is included for demonstration purposes. The achieved results support the decisions made regarding energy behavior (over/under heating), indoor comfort, lighting and energy at an early design stage.
Energy poverty is a significant social, economic, and health issue which increasingly affects millions of households worldwide. Both climate change and the socio-economic crisis have aggravated this ...phenomenon, making families unable to keep adequate comfort conditions at home because of economic constraints and/or dwelling inefficiencies. Considering the recent inflation trends, as well as the global effort to reduce the building sector’s carbon emissions, energy retrofitting of buildings emerges as the most forward-looking strategy to cope with energy poverty risk. In the case of large building stocks, which are typical for social housing complexes across the EU, deep and fast energy retrofitting might prove challenging, especially considering the resource shortages and disruptions to occupants that may arise. Therefore, this article investigates the relationship between the envelope’s insulation ratio and the risk of energy poverty for households. To this end, diverse scenarios are defined, corresponding to progressive increases in the percentage of building envelope that is insulated. The resulting energy needs are calculated for each of them and correlated with local average incomes and relative energy expenses of households. This is tested on an Italian social housing demo case. The results confirm a predictable but not linear correlation between thermal insulation and reduced energy needs for heating, and an interesting side effect on cooling needs for scenarios that perform better in winter. As for income, energy cost has a greater effect on the energy poverty risk when monthly rent is lower, while energy prices have a major role when rent per month is higher.
The European Community introduced the energy certificate of buildings to reduce the energy consumption in buildings and emanated some standards in order to publicize the energy buildings certificate ...procedure. Consequently, to calculate energy performance of buildings (EPB), many numerical codes have been developed, which take into account several parameters in static or dynamic conditions.
In this article three different models for EPB software calculations have been analysed and compared, in order to quantify their gap with the real energy consumptions. The study has been conducted considering a single-family house in Italy, and focused the differences among numerical codes and real consumption in relation with flexible architectural solutions, that are widely utilised especially in rural areas in Mediterranean countries.
Fuel Poverty is a big challenge for everybody: politicians, decision-makers, technicians, researchers, etc. In Italy, a strategy to solve fuel poverty involves action in order to reduce energy ...prices, the AEEG (Italian regulatory authority for electricity gas and water) has defined an Assist Tariff for poor people. Fuel poverty depends on family income and energy prices. Building energy performance also influences required energy consumption, and is a contributing cause of fuel poverty. Subsequently, it is possible to introduce a new Fuel Poverty risk Index, correlated to Building Energy Performance: the Building Fuel Poverty index. The Building Fuel Poverty Index (BFP) allows us to quantify how many buildings need direct action and/or just economic incentives.
The index should be adopted in order to identify subjects that can afford to pay building energy refurbishment. The paper proposes an index in order to evaluate fuel poverty condition correlated to building energy performance.
•How to measure a building energy index to find fuel poverty.•How to use energy performance certificates in order to define.•The building fuel poverty index as a tool to drive policy choice.
Indoor air quality (IAQ) of buildings is a problem that affects both comfort for occupants and the energy consumption of the structure. Controlled mechanical ventilation systems (CMVs) make it ...possible to control the air exchange rate. When using CMV systems, it is interesting to investigate the relationship between the useful thermal energy requirements for ventilation and the energy consumption of these systems. This paper addresses whether there is a correlation between these two parameters. The methodology used in this work involves the application of equations of technical Italian regulations UNI/TS 11300 applied to a case study. The case study is represented by a 54 m3 room, which is assumed to have three CMV systems installed (extraction, insertion, insertion and extraction) for twenty different devices available on the market. Afterwards, simulations of useful thermal energy requirements QH,ve and primary energy EP,V were performed according to the electrical power of each fan W and the ventilation flow. The results show that the two values are not linearly correlated: it is not possible to clearly associate the operating cost for CMV systems according to building requirements. The study also shows that CMV systems are particularly efficient for high-performance buildings, where there is no leakage that can be ascribed to windows infiltrations.
In this research we present the results of a study about thermal comfort measurement and evaluation in kindergartens for children of 4 and 5 years of age.
The overall study objective is to compare ...(1) indoor microclimate parameters, measured with a Datalogger following EN ISO 7730, and (2) children's subjective judgment, collected through a questionnaire following EN ISO 10551. Since we interviewed pre-scholar children, we needed to modify the questionnaire based on a psycho-pedagogical approach. School educators helped us change the questionnaire according to the pedagogical approach of the kindergarten (“Loris Malaguzzi” pedagogical model). This particular approach allowed us to verify how children understand concepts like temperature or heat sensation. The results show that children are sensible to these well-being issues, even if they express their opinion according to specific world models.
The comparison between Datalogger instrumental data and questionnaire highlighted the need to enlarge the concept of comfort, taking into account different subject categories (children, young people, elderly people, infirm, etc.). This analysis shows that children understand the concept of comfort and can define their perceived and preferred thermal comfort level. Moreover, we verified that the PMV of children is slightly higher in respect to adults.
•Adaptive thermal comfort in kindergarten.•Thermal comfort pedagogue point of view.•Children metabolism.•Standard and perceptive thermal comfort comparison.•Kindergarten indoor environmental quality.
As the effects of climate change and urbanisation intensify, liveability and comfort in outdoor spaces decrease. Because of large spaces exposed to solar radiation and low crossing of airflows, ...courtyard buildings are extremely vulnerable in this regard. However, there are significant gaps in the literature on outdoor comfort in courtyards, especially regarding the effect of border configuration (including gap position and features), as well that of tree density. The study proposes a methodology—to be used during preliminary design—to compare the effect of alternative scenarios for courtyard buildings on outdoor microclimate, varying both the building perimeter configuration and courtyard vegetation layout. A matrix is set to combine the two variables and select relevant scenarios, which are then simulated in ENVI-met focusing on air temperature, wind speed and physiological equivalent temperature (PET). A case study in Bologna, Italy (humid subtropical climate) is presented as an example of the implementation. The resulting outdoor microclimate maps and frequency diagrams are compared and discussed. It emerges that both variables have a role in outdoor comfort: while gap configuration affects air temperature more (up to a difference of 1 °C), tree density impacts PET by up to 2 °C difference. The methodology can be replicated in several other contexts to support the optimisation of courtyard building design from the early stages.
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