Innovative technologies, certification and assessment tools for a sustainable building heritage

[EN] It’s clear that good results in the field of environmental sustainability can be obtained by energy efficiency policies for buildings - mostly undertaken or in itinere - built for more than 50% before the disregarded law 373/76 that provided, in the period of the European oil crisis, constraints for design, installation, operation and maintenance of heating systems and requirements for thermal insulation of buildings to contain consumption. On the other hand, it is less clear the part of buildings subject to conservation (in accordance with the Legislative Decree 42/2004 or former regulations on the subject) or listed buildings ope legis (art. 12 of italian legislative Decree 42/2004, asset belonging to the State, regions, public territorial authorities, as well as any other public body and institute and private non-profit legal entities and which are the work of an author who is no longer alive and whose execution dates back to more than seventy years) for which it would not be possible to apply the limitations of the decrees 192/2005 and 311/2006, which relieve the buildings “in which compliance with the requirements would entail an unacceptable alteration of their nature or appearance, with particular reference to historical or artistic features” of the energy efficiency obligations. In this paper we want to justify and illustrate some choices made by international research institutes regarding the difficulty in reconciling the new requests of sustainability related to the need to reduce consumption (especially from fossil fuels) with those of the historical value of the buildings subject to intervention, presenting evaluation criteria that can provide an objective method for quantifying the compatibility between new and existing, criteria that – in order to have predictive capacity and therefore be able to guide choices ex ante and not measure them ex post - use digital design tools (BIM, GIS, etc).[IT] E' evidente che buoni risultati nel campo della sostenibilità ambientale si possono ottenere da politiche di efficienza energetica per gli edifici - per lo più realizzati o in itinere - costruiti per oltre il 50% prima della disattesa legge 373/76 che prevedeva, nel periodo del petrolio europeo crisi, vincoli per la progettazione, installazione, esercizio e manutenzione degli impianti termici e requisiti per l'isolamento termico degli edifici per il contenimento dei consumi.Meno chiara è invece la parte di fabbricato oggetto di conservazione (ai sensi del D.Lgs. 42/2004 o previgenti normative in materia) o di immobili vincolati ope legis (art. 12 D.Lgs. 42/2004, asset appartenenti allo Stato, alle regioni, agli enti pubblici territoriali, nonché ad ogni altro ente ed istituto pubblico e soggetti giuridici privati senza scopo di lucro e che siano opera di autore non più in vita e la cui esecuzione risalga a più di settant'anni ), per i quali non sarebbe possibile applicare le limitazioni dei decreti 192/2005 e 311/2006, che esonerano gli edifici "il cui rispetto dei requisiti comporterebbe un'alterazione inaccettabile della loro natura o aspetto, con particolare riferimento ai o caratteristiche artistiche"degli obblighi di efficienza energetica.In questo lavoro si vogliono giustificare e illustrare alcune scelte fatte da istituti di ricerca internazionali in merito alla difficoltà di conciliare le nuove richieste di sostenibilità legate alla necessità di ridurre i consumi (soprattutto da combustibili fossili) con quelle del valore storico degli edifici oggetto di intervento , presentando criteri di valutazione che possano fornire un metodo oggettivo per quantificare la compatibilità tra nuovo ed esistente, criteri che – per avere capacità predittiva e quindi poter guidare le scelte ex ante e non misurarle ex post – utilizzino strumenti di progettazione digitale (BIM , GIS, ecc.).Minutoli, F. (2021). Innovative technologies, certification and assessment tools for a sustainable building heritage. VITRUVIO - International Journal of Architectural Technology and Sustainability. 6(2):102-115. https://doi.org/10.4995/vitruvio-ijats.2021.16530OJS10211562AA.VV. 2017. Sistema di verifica GBC Historic Building per il restauro e la riqualificazione degli edifici storici, 45-46.Chatzipanagi, A., & Frontini F. (2012.) Building Integrated Photovoltaics - Thermal Aspects: Low Energy House for Testing BiPV Systems, in proceedings of the BRENET Status-Seminar «Forschen für den Bau im Kontext von Energie und Umwelt», ETH-Zürich.Balocco, C., & Marmonti, E. 2013. 'Optimal and sustainable plant refurbishment in historical buildings:a study of anancient monastery converted into a showroom in Florence', Sustainability, 5 (4), 1700-1724. https://doi.org/10.3390/su5041700Boarin, P., Guglielmino, D., Pisello, A.L., & Cotana, F. 2014. Sustainability assessment of historic buildings: lesson learnt from an Italian case study through LEED® rating system, Energy Procedia, 61, 1029-1032. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2014.11.1017Cabeza, L.F., De Gracia A., & Pisello A.L. 2018. 'Integration of renewable technologies in historical and heritage buildings: a review', Energy&Buildings, 177, 96-111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2018.07.058Castaldo, V.L., Pisello, A.L., Boarin, P., Petrozzi, A., & Cotana, F. 2017. 'The experience of international sustainability protocols for retrofitting historical buildings in Italy', Buildings, 7, 52. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings7020052Chen, H., Chiang, C., Shu, C., & Lee, S. 2012. 'Self-power consumption research with the thermal effects and optical properties of the HCRIBIPV window system', Journal of Electronic Science and Technology, 10, 29-36. https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1674-862X.2012.01.005Delponte, E., Marchi, F., Frontini, F., Polo, C., Fath, K., & Batey, M. 2015. BIPV in EU28, from niche to mass market: an assessment of current projects and the potential for growth through product innovation, in Proceedings of the 31st European photovoltaic solar energy conference and exhibition, 3046-3050. https://doi.org/10.4229/EUPVSEC20152015-7DO.15.4Dessì, V. M. 2013. Methods and tools to evaluate visual impact of solar technologies in urban environment, Proceedings of CISBAT, Lausanne, 679-688.Farkas, K., Maturi, L., Scognamiglio, A., Frontini, F., Cristina, M., Probst, M., et al. 2015. Designing photovoltaic systems for architectural integration, criteria and guidelines for product and system developers, Report T.41.A.3/2: IEA SHC Task 41 Solar Energy and Architecture.Florio, P., Munari Probst, M.C., Schüler, A., Roecker, C., & Scartezzini, J.L. 2018. 'Assessing visibility in multi-scale urban planning: a contribution to a method enhancing social acceptability of solar energy in cities', Solar Energy, 173, pp. 97-109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2018.07.059Giombini, M. & Pinchi, E.M. 2015. 'Energy functional retrofitting of historic residential buildings: the case study of the historic center of Perugia', Energy Procedia, 82, 1009-1016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2015.11.859Kandt, A., Hotchkiss, E., Walker, A., Buddenborg, J., & Lindberg, J. 2011. Implementing solar PV projects on historic buildings and in historic districts, Technical Report, NREL/TP-7A40-51297. https://doi.org/10.2172/1026574Kooles, K., Frey, P., & Miller, J. 2012. Installing solar panels on historic buildings. A Survey of the Regulatory Environment, Relatório Técnico do Departamento de Energia dos Estados Unidos-US DOE, North Carolina Solar Center e National Trust for Historic Preservation, US Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office, 52.Li, R., Dai, Y., & Wang, R. 2015. 'Experimental and theoretical analysis on thermal performance of solar thermal curtain wall in building envelope', Energy and Buildings, 87, 324-334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2014.11.029Munari Probst, M. C. & Roecker, C. 2011. Urban acceptability of building integrated solar systems: Leso QSV approach, in Proceedings ISES 2011, Kassel, Germany. https://doi.org/10.18086/SWC.2011.27.10Munari Probst, M. C. & Roecker, C. 2015. Solar Energy promotion and Urban Context protection: LESO-QSV (Quality, Site, Visibility) method, in Proceedings PLEA 2015, Bologna.Munari Probst, M. C. & Roecker, C. 2019. 'Criteria and policies to master the visual impact of solar systems in urban environments: The LESO-QSV method', Solar Energy, 184, pp. 672-687. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2019.03.031Peng, J., Lu, L., Yang, H., & Han, J. 2013. 'Investigation on the annual thermal performance of a photovoltaic wall mounted on a multilayer façade', Applied Energy, 112, 646-656. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2012.12.026Pisello, A.L., Petrozzi, A., Castaldo, V.L., & Cotana, F. 2016. 'On an innovative integrated technique for energy refurbishment of historical buildings: thermal-energy, economic and environmental analysis of a case study', Appl.Energy, 162, 1313-1322. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.APENERGY.2015.05.061Sibley, M. 2006. The Historic hammāms of Damascus and Fez: lessons of sustainability and future developments, in 23rd conference on passive and low energy architecture (PLEA), Geneva; Switzerland, 181-186.Sibley, M., & Sibley, M. 2013. 'Hybrid green technologies for retrofitting heritage buildings in North African medinas: combining vernacular and high-tech solutions for an innovative solar powered lighting system for hammam buildings', Energy Procedia, 42, 718-725. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2013.11.074Wang, M., Peng, J., Li, N., Lu, L., Ma, T., & Yang, H. 2016. 'Assessment of energy performance of semi-transparent PV insulating glass units using a validated simulation model', Energy, 112 (Supplement C), 538-548. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2016.06.120Zhang, W., Lu, L., & Peng, J., Song, A. 2016. 'Comparison of the overall energy performance of semi-transparent photovoltaic windows and common energy-efficient windows in Hong Kong', Energy and Buildings, 128 (Supplement C), 511-518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2016.07.016Zhang, W., Lu, L., Chen, X. 2017. 'Performance evaluation of Vacuum Photovoltaic Insulated glass unit', Energy Procedia, 105 (Supplement C), 322-326. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2017.03.321Zhou, Y. P., Wu, J. Y., Wang, R. Z., Shiochi, S., & Li, Y. M. 2008. 'Simulation and experimental validation of the variable-refrigerant-volume (VRV) air-conditioning system in EnergyPlus', Energy and Buildings, 40(6), 1041-1047. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.ENBUILD.2007.04.02

Occurrence of Legionella in beach shower facilities

It has been analyzed 36 samples of water proceeding from beach shower facilities: 7 of these were found to be contaminated with Legionella (19.44%). In three showers, L. pneumophila 1 was reported, in two L. pneumophila 2-14; in another two cases L. pneumophila 2-14 was found together with Legionella sp. and L. pneumophila 1 together with L. pneumophila 2-14. This study, which confirms the circulation of Legionella in our region of southern Italy, extends the list of the possible sources of infection, including also public and private beaches among the contaminated sites. It is the Authors opinion that when evaluating the risk in these cases we should take into account that the crowding of the beaches in the summer months and the communal nature of shower use in these periods increases the frequency of exposure of children and old people. These vulnerable categories are significantly more likely to develop the disease once infected

Signed Web Forms

As more and more Web applications are available on the Internet, they are becoming a standard way also for many organizations and institutions to offer their services and/or improve the efficiency of office procedures. Some of these applications require the user to input some information, typically by filling out a form, and submit the data. In many cases the user is required to digitally sign the data submitted. The problem of the digital signature has been solved with appropriate algorithms based on the use of two different keys: the private key and the public key. The private key must be known only to its legitimate owner, certified by a Certification Authority, and must be protected from unauthorized access. This problem has been solved by means of smart-cards and USB-tokens. However when the user decides to sign a document displayed on the screen, the software actually uses his private key to sign an internal representation of the document. Thus, another problem arises: the user must be sure that the document actually signed is the same document he has been shown. Since few years the WYSIWYS (What You See Is What You Sign) technology has been suggested, so that users know exactly what they sign. We propose an architecture based on this technology. The signing module is embedded in a Web Service that must be invoked to obtain the digital signature of a given document. This Web Service shows the document to the user that decides whether to sign it or not. Finally, we have tested this architecture by implementing a prototype of a Form-based Web application

Palazzo Capponi delle Rovinate a Firenze: analisi e valutazioni per il progetto di restauro

Palazzo Capponi delle Rovinate, was build between 1406 and 1426, it was commissioned from Niccolò da Uzzano and Lorenzo di Bicci, to young Filippo Brunelleschi, as written from Vasari, do the recent studies evidence. According the 1427 cadastre the building is accountant as build and actually used by the family. After the death of the Uzzanos brothers, the building passes trough wedding to the Capponi’s family. The name “Rovinate” comes form the continuous landslides happening in that area, for this reason the name Rovinate, comes from. The relief of the building and the analysis of the deterioration, architectonical and structural, have affected mostly the basement, ground floor, mezzanino and the under roof areas, the intermediate levels were not accountable of relief, because the are residential. Although, they were inspected, and the cracking framework seems aligned with the rest of the evidence. The conducted studies allowed us to understand the evolution phases of the structures also the nature of the materials and techniques used and the peculiarities of the geological underground. The failure analysis reviled a rotary translation, in the south-west corner of the building, followed by cracks in the opposite corner, accounted as strange

Smart balancing of E-scooter sharing systems via deep reinforcement learning: a preliminary study

Nowadays, micro-mobility sharing systems have become extremely popular. Such systems consist in fleets of dockless electric vehicles which are deployed in cities, and used by citizens to move in a more ecological and flexible way. Unfortunately, one of the issues related to such technologies is its intrinsic load imbalance, since users can pick up and drop off the electric vehicles where they prefer. In this paper we present ESB-DQN, a multi-agent system for E-Scooter Balancing (ESB) based on Deep Reinforcement Learning where agents are implemented as Deep Q-Networks (DQN). ESB-DQN offers suggestions to pick or return e-scooters in order to make the fleet usage and sharing as balanced as possible, still ensuring that the original plans of the user undergo only minor changes. The main contributions of this paper include a careful analysis of the state of the art, an innovative customer-oriented rebalancing strategy, the integration of state-of-the-art libraries for deep Reinforcement Learning into the existing ODySSEUS simulator of mobility sharing systems, and preliminary but promising experiments that suggest that our approach is worth further exploration

Tecniche costruttive “antisismiche” e interventi di restauro “moderno” nell’archimandriato di Messina e nel monastero di San Filippo di Demenna

The Basilian monks of the greek’s rite, are rooted in the whole territory of Messina and build many monasteries. Among the most important archimandriato of the Holy Savior of Messina, main church of the order, and the monastery of San Filippo of Demenna (or Fragalà), near to Frazzanò, in the province of Messina. The two monasteries are linked not only by the period of the foundation but also from the relationship between both the Norman house of Sicily, in fact Adelaide del Vasto, wife of Roger I and mother of Roger II, despite being the cause of the Latinization of the island protect both monasteries and endows them with possessions that ensure survival. Both buildings are the subject of the restoration based on an anti-sismic intervention, the archimandriato in the first half of the seventeenth century, while Fragalà in the first half of the twentieth century, in both cases we see how the focus on the existing structures and the use of materials try to ensure the buildings "durability" to the earthquake

Ciudad, arquitecturas y restauraciones, problemas de conservación de los cascos históricos

This writing begins revisiting the theories which gave the principle references for the restoration of monuments,till the protection of the “modern”. The first part of this article finished with a light description of the restoration works that took place in Firenze at the end of the nineteen century. Afterwards, it tries to explain the methods used in the restoration of historic towns, attending to other subjects, not only to image. But to structural and functional meanings, in order to be able to improve the way of living in the historic towns. Practical examples of restoration interventions as those of Palazzo Dami and Palazzo Uffizi in Firenze, close this article.Abre el artículo un breve recorrido histórico sobre las normas para la restauración, dando las principales referencias hasta llegar al concepto de protección del “moderno”. Cierra esta primera parte del artículo, una breve anotación sobre los trabajos llevados a cabo en Florencia capital, durante el siglo diecinueve, intervenciones que han infl uido considerablemente en la moderna practica de restauración. En la parte central del artículo, se estudia la metodología considerada más apropiada para la intervención en los centros históricos, con proyectos de restauración urbana que no se limitan a mejorar el tejido urbano en su imagen. Sino en otros aspectos como los estructurales y funcionales, dirigidos a conseguir una mayor habitabilidad y disfrute de las ciudades históricas, con ejemplos de intervenciones más o menos logradas. Dos ejemplos prácticos de intervenciones cierran el artículo, la restauración del Palazzo Dami en Florencia y la restauración y consolidación de algunas zonas del Palazzo Uffizi en la misma ciudad

Post-Mortem Immunohistochemical Evidence of β2-Adrenergic Receptor Expression in the Adrenal Gland

The evidence from post-mortem biochemical studies conducted on cortisol and catecholamines suggest that analysis of the adrenal gland could provide useful information about its role in human pathophysiology and the stress response. Authors designed an immunohistochemical study on the expression of the adrenal β2-adrenergic receptor (β2-AR), a receptor with high-affinity for catecholamines, with the aim to show which zones it is expressed in and how its expression differs in relation to the cause of death. The immunohistochemical study was performed on adrenal glands obtained from 48 forensic autopsies of subjects that died as a result of different pathogenic mechanisms using a mouse monoclonal β2-AR antibody. The results show that immunoreactivity for β2-AR was observed in all adrenal zones. Furthermore, immunoreactivity for β2-AR has shown variation in the localization and intensity of different patterns in relation to the original cause of death. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that demonstrates β2-AR expression in the human cortex and provides suggestions on the possible involvement of β2-AR in human cortex hormonal stimulation. In conclusion, the authors provide a possible explanation for the observed differences in expression in relation to the cause of death

Formalizing Knowledge by Ontologies: OWL and KIF

During the last years, the activities of knowledge formalization and sharing useful to allow for semantically enabled management of information have been attracting growing attention, expecially in distributed environments like the Web. In this report, after a general introduction about the basis of knowledge abstraction and its formalization through ontologies, we briefly present a list of relevant formal languages used to represent knowledge: CycL, FLogic, LOOM, KIF, Ontolingua, RDF(S) and OWL. Then we focus our attention on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF). OWL is the main language used to describe and share ontologies over the Web: there are three OWL sublanguages with a growing degree of expressiveness. We describe its structure as well as the way it is used in order to reasons over asserted knowledge. Moreover we briefly present three relevant OWL ontology editors: Prot?eg?e, SWOOP and Ontotrack and two important OWL reasoners: Pellet and FACT++. KIF is mainly a standard to describe knowledge among different computer systems so as to facilitate its exchange. We describe the main elements of KIF syntax; we also consider Sigma, an environment for creating, testing, modifying, and performing inference with KIF ontologies. We comment some meaningful example of both OWL and KIF ontologies and, in conclusion, we compare their main expresive features