Improving the Passive Energy Performance of the Buildings’ Envelope in the Southern European Area: A Study on the Integration of a Tensile Material

Abstract

In this paper, the energy and environmental impacts of a passive retrofit action, involving the installation, on an office building, of a second-skin system with the external layer made of a PVC-coated polyester fabric, were evaluated in terms of primary energy saving and carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. The primary energy consumption and the carbon dioxide equivalent emissions associated with the considered case studies were evaluated through the dynamic simulation software TRNSYS, across a whole year. The study was carried out considering five cities (Athens, Barcelona, Lisbon, Marseille and Naples) in five different countries in southern Europe upon varying the orientation of the two main façades of building (north-south and east-west orientation were considered). The office building was modeled in detail considering different construction characteristics upon varying the country. The simulation results highlight that the best results in terms of PES (equal to 22.4%) in Naples, while the best results in terms of CO2 (equal to 32.0 MgCO2,eq) were obtained when the building is located in Athens. In addition, the adoption of the proposed passive lightweight retrofit solution allowed the reduction of both cooling and thermal yearly energy demand up to 57.7% (Marseille) and 17.8% (Barcelona), respectively.

Passive Strategies for Building Retrofitting: Performances Analysis and Incentive Policies for the Iranian Scenario

“…In addition, passive retrofit actions are usually less invasive, allowing for renovations without changing the structure of historical buildings [26]. One of the most useful passive strategies to decrease energy usage in buildings is installing a second-skin (SS) facade system [17,20,23,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. The SS facade systems consist of a standard facade, an air cavity, and an additional external skin.…”

“…The SS facade systems consist of a standard facade, an air cavity, and an additional external skin. According to [17,20,23,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], the proper design of the SS facade systems can lead to several environmental and economic advantages; these benefits can be summarized as:…”

“…affect building envelope performance. In addition, when new building envelope components have been developed and tested only in the laboratory [17,32,41], before realizing a real case study, the simulation can help to verify the energy and economic feasibility. Nowadays, the software often used in the literature [31,[42][43][44][45][46][47] to simulate building performance includes EnergyPlus [48], TRNSYS [49], IDA ICE [50], and IES VE [51].…”

“…As suggested in [58][59][60], two main building characteristics have been considered, which mainly affect the building's passive behavior and performance: the building orientation and the Windowsto-Wall Ratios (WWR). Two different building orientations have been considered for the modeling and the simulations: north-south (Figure 1a) and east-west (Figure 1b) [32,58].…”

“…The literature review [17,20,23,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] highlighted a number of benefits achievable using the SS facade system. In addition, the part of the literature review related to the Iranian climate [27][28][29][30]35,36] highlighted that: (i) all the analyzed researches are focused on temperate climates, (ii) glass is usually used as SS material, and (iii) only one research evaluated the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.…”