ENERGY ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING AIMED AT DESIGNING THE RETROFIT IN HISTORICAL AND HERITAGE BUILDINGS

Giovanni Litti ¹, Amaryllis Audenaert ¹ ², Johan Braet ²

1 EMIB Lab, Applied Engineering Laboratory for Sustainable Materials, Infrastructure and Buildings, Antwerp University, Belgium

2 Department Engineering Management, Antwerp University, Belgium

Abstract

The European existing building stock comprises a substantial opportunity for reducing primary energy consumption, this makes energy retrofit in constructed environment relevant. However when retrofitting strategies are carried out in historical or museum buildings, the issue in linking energy improvement to building protection arises.

Frequently retrofitting strategies are designed on the basis of the solely primary energy demand reduction and Life Cycle Cost evaluation (LCC). Building preservation, intervention compatibility, indoor climate amelioration, materials conservation, assessment of the environmental impact for the proposed energy measures are totally neglected. Moreover the interventions are often designed without a preliminary building energy-environmental monitoring, this procedure leads to less accurate building simulations and consequentially to uncertain effectiveness of the proposed retrofitting strategies.

This contribution, by reporting intermediate results from a case study in Belgium, proposes a holistic methodology for energy-environmental-architectural diagnosis in historical buildings based on an overall understanding of the construction. Beside an extensive building monitoring methodology, the calibration of the dynamic model on the basis of the measured physical parameters is proposed. The in-depth examination of historical buildings allows both: the increase of knowledge on the building problems and potentialities and the feasibility of the potential retrofitting measure.

Keywords

Heritage buildings indoor environmental monitoring, building dynamic simulations, model calibration, energy retrofitting historical buildings