Refurbishment design through cost-optimal methodology: The case study of a social housing in the northern Italy

Abstract

The energy retrofit of social housing buildings in Italy is a big challenge, for their poor energy performance and their large diffusion, but it is affected by several problems mainly due to lack of funds. Therefore, a solid methodological base to achieve optimal energy levels, considering the best balance with the costs, can be useful for a cheaper approach to their energy performance improvement. The cost optimal methodology indicated by the European Directive 2010/31/UE is here applied on a social housing building, located in the northern Italy, in order to demonstrate how it can be used as a supporting decision tool for refurbishment interventions on existing residential buildings, when limited investments from Public Authorities or privates are involved. A series of energy efficiency measures are defined in order to identify different improvement scenarios, related both to the envelope and to the technical systems. After a first step calculating the primary energy consumption and the Global Cost in accordance with the EN 15459:2007, the best costs/benefits ratio is evaluated among all the hypothesized scenarios. The results of the research are expected to be a stimulus for the definition of specific refurbishment plans for the energy efficiency increase of social housing.

A procedure to evaluate the most suitable integrated solutions for increasing energy performance of the building’s envelope, avoiding moisture problems

“…The methodology indicated in [8], completed by means of an economic investigation with the costs evaluation procedure [14], is reported in Fig.1.…”

The Role of the Internal Heat Gains for Artificial Lighting on the Energy Performance of Buildings

“…• In conclusion, it can be said that the regulatory frontier of nZEB buildings is now a mandatory requirement for all new private and public buildings, the importance of controlling artificial lighting, space heating and cooling systems and indoor air quality, in the comfort/energy saving equation, is recognized [18]. The next step will be to overcome and improve the concept of an ultra-highenergy, intelligent performance building.…”

Application of model predictive control for the optimization of thermo-hygrometric comfort and energy consumption of buildings

“…Thanks to Building Energy Simulation (BES) through numerical models (Coakley et al, 2014) significant effort has been spent to predict the energy demand of buildings and to evaluate their energy performance. The BES models are especially built to simulate existing or designed buildings and are applied in different ways so as to improve the efficiency of the building sector (Belussi et al, 2013;Belussi et al, 2015;Belussi et al, 2015;Guazzi et al, 2017;Magrini et al, 2017). The BES models are mainly classified into three categories, "white", "black" and "grey" box according to the method applied for the resolution of the transient heat equations and the parameters used (physical, statistical or a combination of them, respectively) (Amara et al, 2015).…”