Abstract. The thermal insulation of buildings, intended as wrap feature which determines the dispersion of heat, the reference parameter is necessary to contain the thermal losses during the winter season. The transmittance of the opaque components, used as an indicator of the energy quality of a casing, together with the overall coefficient of dispersion, represents a proper descriptor of the behavior during the heating season.However, if a strong insulation in winter conditions brings only positive effects, the same cannot be said for the summer conditions. A high value of the insulation in the casing is convenient only when the gains free, either in the form of solar contribution that of endogenous heat, are controlled and restricted. From the national transposition of the 2002/91/CE legislation up to the 2010/31/EU on the energy performance of buildings, performance values are set very restrictive transmittance of opaque surfaces that both of those transparent to the new buildings. The same does not happen for the thermophysical characteristics able to implement strategies for the control of solar radiation during the summer period, the fluctuations in external temperatures during the summer period.This article shows some experimental evidence of the effects on transmission rate and density of the opaque elements of the buildings carried out on a case study of a representative building of climate-Mediterranean summer: The study verify the results produced by increased insulation of the building envelope on energy performance of buildings during the summer through indicators such as temperature and energy consumption to maintain the same constant with respect to the prescribed values.

Sustainable growth, environmental preservation, and improvement of life quality are strategic fields of worldwide interest and cornerstones of international policies. Humanity health and prosperity are closely related to our present choices on sustainable development. The main sources of pollution concern industry, including mining, chemical companies, and refineries, wastewater treatment; and consumers themselves. In order to guide and evaluate the effects of environmental policies, diffuse monitoring campaigns and detailed (big) data analyses are needed. In this respect, the development and availability of innovative sensor platforms for field analysis and remote sensing are of crucial relevance. In this review, we provide an overview of the area, analyzing the major needs, available technologies, novel approaches, and perspectives. Among environmental pollutants that threaten the biosphere, we focus on inorganic and organic contaminants, which affect air and water quality. We describe the technologies for their assessment in the environment and then draw some conclusions and mention future perspectives opened by the integration of sensing technologies with robotics and the Internet of Things. Without the ambition to be exhaustive in such a rapidly growing field, this review is intended as a support for researchers and stakeholders looking for current, state-of-the-art, and key enabling technologies for environmental monitoring.

Abstract. This paper proposes two complementary procedures for assessing the indoor global comfort: the first one, prevalently objective, is based on the acquisition of microclimate measured data and computed subjective values; the second one, that is purely subjective, uses a questionnaire drawn from the ISO/DP 10551 Recommendation. An application to some lecture-halls is here showed