Energy Retrofit Strategies for Residential Building Envelopes: An Italian Case Study of an Early-50s Building

During the last few years, the issues of energy efficiency and energy saving have dominated the buildings research field. New constructions are based on efficient design and, because of this, the real challenge is to retrofit existing buildings. Italian standards impose thermal transmittance limits for opaque and transparent surfaces, according to the climatic area. In order to understand buildings' energy behavior, an accurate analysis, carried out by employing advanced calculation codes and instrumental diagnosis—provided by the use of heat flow meter, surface temperature probes and thermal imaging camera—is needed. In this paper, a structure built in the 50 s has been analyzed, by means of a measurement campaign, to investigate the building's characteristics and its vulnerability. Finally, some retrofit hypotheses have been evaluated by means of a well-known dynamic code. All investments have to be analyzed under a financial point of view, considering materials and installation costs. For this reason, the payback time has been calculated in order to understand how quickly the energy upgrading can be repaid

Influence of insulating materials on green building rating system results

This paper analyzes the impact of a change in the thermal insulating material on both the energy and environmental performance of a building, evaluated through two different green building assessment methods: Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and Istituto per l'innovazione e Trasparenza degli Appalti e la Compatibilità Ambientale (ITACA). LEED is one of the most qualified rating systems at an international level; it assesses building sustainability thanks to a point-based system where credits are divided into six different categories. One of these is fully related to building materials. The ITACA procedure derives from the international evaluation system Sustainable Building Tool (SBTool), modified according to the Italian context. In the region of Umbria, ITACA certification is composed of 20 technical sheets, which are classified into five macro-areas. The analysis was developed on a residential building located in the central Italy. It was built taking into account the principles of sustainability as far as both structural and technical solutions are concerned. In order to evaluate the influence of thermal insulating material, different configurations of the envelope were considered, replacing the original material (glass wool) with a synthetic one (expanded polystyrene, EPS) and two natural materials (wood fiber and kenaf). The study aims to highlight how the materials characteristics can affect building energy and environmental performance and to point out the different approaches of the analyzed protocols

In situ thermal characterization of existing buildings aiming at NZEB standard: A methodological approach

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Influence of soundscape in the experience of an urban area: a case study in Rome

Over the last years several studies have demonstrated how the same environment can lead to different perceptual outcomes if the surrounding sounds change. Soundscape studies promote a user-centred approach for the characterization and management of acoustic environments in cities. There are several available protocols to gather perceptual data about how people experience the soundscapes in urban areas, and the most common tool is the “soundwalk”, a procedure where a group of people walks and stops at given locations in order to assess the acoustic environment, using some sound-related attributes (e.g., calm, pleasant, vibrant, chaotic, etc.). This research aims at evaluating the influence that different acoustic conditions together with specific environmental ones can induce on the pedestrians’ perception. In particular, the analysis was carried out within an artistically significant and culturally relevant urban district characterized by different traffic conditions, such as the archaeological area of the Colosseum in Rome. For this purpose, a soundwalk combined with a sound levels measurement campaign was organised in the archaeological area outside the Colosseum, during daytime and night time conditions, with a group of students applying the Method A of the ISO/TS 12913-2:2018, which addresses soundscape data collection. The results show how the correlations between the subjective responses and the measured data are significant and they can vary if the surrounding changes, both in terms of acoustical characteristics and environmental ones

A New Method of Technical Analysis to Optimise the Design of Low Impact Energy Systems for Buildings

Energy consumption for civil constructions represents about 40% of total energy requirements, so it is necessary to achieve the goal of energy savings and the consequent reduction of greenhouse gases emissions. The study in content aims to provide a design methodology enables to identify the best plant configuration for buildings from a technical, economic and environmental point of view. To assess validity of the calculation model, an analysis of an historical building was carried out in combination with two softwares of proven reliability: TRNSYS, used to evaluate the thermal demand of users, and RETScreen, used to estimate the validity of the chosen energy model

Neighbourhood sustainability: State of the art, critical review and space-temporal analysis

This paper introduces a review on sustainability-related concepts at a neighbourhood scale. 3909 abstracts of papers on “neighbourhood sustainability” published between the late eighties and February 2020 were downloaded from Scopus in order to perform a text mining analysis. The concept of neighbourhood sustainability is studied and discussed at both geographical and temporal level, employing clustering methods. Marked differences in the elaboration of neighbourhood sustainability-related concepts can be tracked at spatial level and linked to the different socioeconomic, cultural and climatic conditions of the considered geographic areas. A significant temporal evolution of the concept can be also tracked with a focus on specific aspects of the sustainability concept in different periods of time. The analysis can help in defining more rigorous evaluation categories and criteria for neighbourhoods sustainability rating systems: new criteria should be included and an international homogenization is recommended in the definition of a common scheme of macro-categories, as well as local versions of the tools. Finally, the adoption of a dynamic approach, that doesn’t stop after the projects realization, is proposed for the evaluation of the sustainability at a neighbourhood scale

Virtual reality simulation for un steady traffic flow analysis

According to literature, the analysis of traffic conditions and operating speeds are of main importance for road engineers. The traditional approach is based on observations and surveys on the road. Under this empirical view, traffic is studied in a specific road section according to the Eulerian analysis. Dynamic measurements of vehicles while driving are very difficult to be performed. On the basis of their experience in interactive driving simulation in virtual reality environment, the authors evaluate the possibility of studying, through simulation, the traffic unsteady flow under a Lagrangian approach. This new perspective becomes possible to be investigated because the simulation technologies are naturally more suitable for analyzing the variability of traffic, speeds, trajectories and dynamic conditions of vehicles along all the route. This paper shows the results of a large number of experiments intended to verify the feasibility and the significance of this new methodology for experimental analysis. The experiments have been carried out considering different traffic flows; for each condition, the kinematic and dynamic parameters, the position and lateral displacement of the vehicles and other parameters of a significant numbers of drivers have been processed. The conclusion of the study confirms the reliability of the method, moreover the simulation technology makes it possible to develop, under repeatible conditions, so many experiments that the statistical significance increases greatly rather than the traditional approach based on the real truth observations