Comfort and economic criteria for selecting passive measures for the energy refurbishment of residential buildings in Catalonia

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed method to develop cost-optimal studies for the energy renovation of residential buildings. A realistic characterization of the building has been introduced, using measurement and survey data. The method allows improving the interaction between the occupancy and the building, and the characterization of the real state of the construction. In addition, the building simulation includes vernacular strategies of the Mediterranean regions, as for example the natural ventilation and the use of solar protection.The method presented takes part of an innovative approach: two-step optimization considering thermal comfort, energy and economic criteria. The passive optimization, the first part, is the focus of the paper and evaluates the passive measures from an economic and thermal comfort point of view. This method prioritizes the passive measures rather than the active ones, guaranteeing the thermal comfort of the users in all cases.The paper shows the results of a multi-family building built in the years 1990-2007 and located in two climates C2 and B3 (Barcelona and Tarragona). The method provides technical and economic information about a set of passive energy efficiency measures, with the objective to help to make decisions to the experts, politicians and users.

Cost-effective analysis for selecting energy efficiency measures for refurbishment of residential buildings in Catalonia

“…The estimation of the daylighting is explained in [1]. Table 6 describes the control strategy for the artificial lighting implemented in the model.…”

“…The comfort index used were the Long-term Percentage of Dissatisfied (LDP) for the annual, warm and cold period, and the hours of overheating (OH), which are explained in detail in [1,27]. The LDP index was calculated using the operative temperature as a short comfort index, following the ASHRAE adaptive model.…”

“…The work covers some aspects that have been described in the introduction. The study propose a cost-effective evaluation divided in two steps ( Figure 1): first a passive evaluation, presented previously [1], where the envelope performance is improved using thermal comfort and initial investment costs as a criteria of decision; and a second step, active evaluation, where the passive and actives measures are combined and evaluated using the global cost and the non-primary energy consumption to find the cost-optimal scenario.…”

Solution Validation for a Double Façade Prototype

“…In [36] you can review the details of the model used; in [37,38] an application of this methodology for the simulation analysis is shown. From this specification, a tool named SDLPS [39] allows the execution of the model formalized in SDL, obtaining the solutions without the need to perform a specific implementation.…”

Identification of cost-optimal and NZEB refurbishment levels for representative climates and building typologies across Europe

“…Static (or quasistatic) and symmetric primary energy factors are used as weights in the balance. Ashrafiana et al 2016Refurbishment (1985-1999 Insulation levels of building envelope (9), window types (6) Apartment block (2729 m 2 ) Turkey (Istanbul, Antalya, and Erzurum) Ortiz et al 2016a, b Refurbishment (1991-2007 Insulation levels of building envelope (32), windows type (2), solar protection (1), heating and cooling systems (2), ventilation strategy (2), user behavior (1), solar systems (2) Apartment block (400 m 2 ) Barcelona (Spain) n.a. not available stage (it considers in one single step all the technologies and their combinations, rather than optimizing step by step); (ii) it describes the entire Energy-Cost plane rather than being limited to the Pareto frontier; (iii) it computes a large number of variants, thus avoiding to rely on a pre-judgment from the analyst of the suitable combinations which might miss some relevant variant; and iv) it includes a base refurbishment level as a useful reference for the entire energy and cost calculation.…”