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Energy diagnosis of a historic building and building simulation.

Number: pap. DEC-03

Author(s) : ROBERTI F., EXNER D., OBEREGGER U. F., et al.

Summary

The energy diagnosis and the energy refurbishment of a historic building are in most of the cases difficult. Not only there are seldom drawings with any constructive indications, but often there are also limited possibilities to investigate the properties of the building envelope because invasive measurements are not allowed. Dynamic simulation models may be used not only to investigate the possible retrofit interventions and to optimize them, but also to improve the energy diagnosis by simulation model calibration and validation from the measured performance. In this work, we analyzed the “Waaghaus” (weigh house), a historic building located in Bolzano/Bozen (Northern Italy), one of the eight case-studies within the FP7 project 3encult. It is a four storeys XIII century building with thick stone walls and a wooden roof located in the center of the city. The former use during the middle age was to weigh the products before they could go to the market. Today it is unused and without any heating and cooling system, waiting for a complete architectural and energy refurbishment to become a photography museum. This work focuses on the diagnosis of the building’s thermal behavior and on the sensitivity analysis of the simulation model’s parameters. We investigated the properties of the thermal envelope, measured the infiltration rates and equipped the building with a monitoring system measuring the air temperature and relative humidity of some rooms and of some outdoor and indoor surfaces. Then, with all the collected information, we built the energy simulation model of the building with the software EnergyPlus 7.2. After some tuning of the model parameters by graphically comparing the monitored and simulated data, we did a sensitivity analysis in order to explore the impact of the model parameters on the errors between monitored and simulated data. The sensitivity analysis has shown that at a building level the thickness of the exterior wall, the constant term coefficient in the infiltration model and the solar transmittance of the windows are the most influencing factors. Other important factors are the material properties of the external wall, the infiltration rates, the window dirt correction factor and the temperature term coefficient
in the infiltration model.

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Pages: 14 p.

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Details

  • Original title: Energy diagnosis of a historic building and building simulation.
  • Record ID : 30012156
  • Languages: English
  • Source: 49th AiCARR International Conference. Historical and existing buildings: designing the retrofit. An overview from energy performances to indoor air quality.
  • Publication date: 2014/02

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