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This work deals with the design of an indoor environment dedicated to autistic individuals, who may suffer from hypersensitivity to acoustic stimuli. Specifically, in this volume customized pieces of furniture are included, containing smart sensors, designed to help people with cognitive deficits to live an independent life. Among the indoor comfort aspects, the acoustic requirements have been investigated, in order to guarantee both the optimal functioning of the acoustic sensors and the acoustic occupants’ well-being. The optimal indoor acoustic levels are based on a literature review. Measurements are performed in order to calibrate a 3D acoustic model. Then diverse scenarios are analysed, and an optimized configuration is proposed and realized. The model is then validated with the final acoustic measurements, which confirm the designed results.

The design of nZEB buildings, as well as the implementation of retrofit interventions in existing structures, are essential tools for reducing energy consumption in buildings and increasing decarbonization of the building sector. To describe the effectiveness of a retrofit intervention, in addition to the analysis of the benefits in terms of costs and energy savings, an environmental analysis should also be performed, introducing various indicators, such as energy and environmental payback times. In this article, we considered a residential building located in Montemarcello (Liguria, North-west of Italy) that had been subjected to a refurbishment and an expansion, with the aim of evaluating the energy and carbon savings achievable due to the interventions carried out. The life cycle analysis approach was applied to calculate the environmental payback times. The main purpose of this work is the application of an integrated approach to assess the economic, energetic and environmental convenience of retrofit interventions during the entire life cycle of the building, underlining the importance of considering LCA and environmental aspects to achieve decarbonisation of the construction sector. The results show that energy and environmental payback times are lower than the useful life of the building and of its components, and that LCA proves to be a strategic methodology for studying the problems deriving from global warming and energy supply in the building sector.

Numerical simulations are widely used to evaluate the thermal comfort and energy savings in the retrofit of historic buildings. In most cases, however, no detailed data are available on the materials and stratigraphy of the building envelopes, and on-site measurements can be expensive and time consuming. The present work uses as a case study a university building characterized by a high thermal capacity in the city of Rome to verify whether the use of natural ventilation can be a practice of use in order to guarantee energy saving and natural comfort. To this end, in the summer of 2020, an experimental campaign was carried out aimed at acquiring thermofluximetric measurements through the vertical walls, the air temperature inside and outside the analyzed environment and the air velocity. Measurements were conducted under three different usage protocols, including night ventilation and 24-hour continuous ventilation. These measurements made it possible to identify the thermophysical characteristics of a wall considered "equivalent" to the real wall, allowing the realization of thermofluidodynamic computational models. In particular, in the study, 3 different stratigraphies were considered and compared, corresponding in the first case to the equivalent wall, in the second to that available from the Comsol software library, and, finally, in the third and last case, from literature data (Tabula project) for the building typology analyzed. From the analysis, it emerged that the 3 groups of parameters do not have a significant impact in terms of variation of internal comfort, confirming the reliability of the use of the literature values for these types of modeling.

Actions contemplated in Sustainable Energy (and Climate) Action Plans (SEAPs), which municipalities adhering to the EU initiative called “The Covenant of Mayors” are required to prepare, regard many sectors, among which are buildings. To implement such plans, it is necessary to make use of methods for predicting energy use in buildings. Technicians involved in this tend to adopt easy-touse simulation models because of the common mid-level expertise of the offices involved. However, such simplified methods could result in a less accurate evaluation of the energy demand of buildings. In this paper the suitability of the quasi-steady state and the dynamic approach, in the frame of these new urban energy planning tools, is assessed. Specifically, a comparison between the two methods reported in the EN ISO 52016-1 Standard (namely the quasi-steady state monthly method and the dynamic hourly method), used here as representative of the two cited classes of models, is drawn. Despite some limitations of the quasi-steady state model found in the analysis, the possibility to still use both modelling approaches to implement SEAPs is argued in the paper. Moreover, a tentative procedural scheme is proposed, which technicians working on SEAPs can usefully follow in order to choose the most appropriate modelling approach that can be used depending on the specific situation to address.

The AED (Acoustic Event Detection) and SSR (Sound Source Recognition) systems are increasingly used in projects involving home automation, security, help for the visually impaired or for the elderly who want to pursue projects of independent living. The application of such technologies can also become a valid reference in the case of subjects suffering from cognitive, not just physical, deficits (Down syndrome, autism, etc.). In these cases remote assistance systems can represent a strong support both for the people who take care of them (parents, specialized personnel), and also for people with cognitive disabilities to pursue projects of independent living. Based on the study of the peculiarities that the internal spaces hosting activities for people with various cognitive deficits must have, criteria for acoustic comfort and internal design have been optimized for certain types of living, working and resting spaces. The aim of this work is to understand how the indoor sound field of dedicated rooms may affect boundary conditions for the installation of AED and SSR and how the specific interior design for special spaces may influence the speech intelligibility and clarity of these rooms.

Nowadays, for NZEB buildings the complexity of the interactions between thermal plants and buildings is increasing. The reduction of the primary energy consumptions in NZEB is generally pursued by maximizing the use of renewable energy which gives a discontinuous contribution during the season; it becomes important to study in detail the dynamic interactions between the building and the adopted HVAC systems, by taking into account unsteady state behaviour of walls, roofs, windows and so on. This kind of analysis can be obtained by using conventional dynamic simulation software (i.e. TRNSYS, ESP-r, Energy Plus, DesignBuilder). It has been demonstrated that a detailed analysis of controlled HVAC systems can be also obtained by using SIMULINK and in the past open block libraries made in SIMULINK have been proposed for HVAC system analysis, like in the case of the CARNOT blockset. However, a weak point of CARNOT is still considered the building modelling due to its limited flexibility and completeness. For this reason, a new specific library named ALMABuild based on SIMULINK blocks for the dynamic modelling of a building is presented in this paper with the aim to integrate and improve the blocks already available in CARNOT. In ALMABuild the modelling of a building with SIMULINK is driven by means of a series of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). In this paper a benchmark of ALMABuild is shown by using TRNSYS as reference. The comparison evidenced a good agreement between the two methods. However, differences are present each time that the procedure indicated by the European Standard EN ISO 13790:2008 (and integrally followed by ALMABuild) is not in agreement with the procedure followed by TRNSYS (based on American standards).

Direct normal radiation (DNI) has great importance for both energy building simulations and solar energy systems. The data is seldom available from measurements but usually is recovered from global radiation data using split algorithms. The present paper analyses the performance of 33 different split radiation models and the error which arises when applied to building energy simulations using generated hourly weather files. The split models have been applied to an observed dataset composed by 525888 points, which comprises global and diffuse radiation on the horizontal plane, related to -year measurements, starting from 2001 with 10-minute time steps. The generated weather files have been employed as input for energy simulations with EnergyPlus on a building generated using DesignBuilder software. We investigated the impact of the weather files in building energy simulation highlighting the performances of four models selected among the 33 models by means of statistical indicators, during different periods of the dataset, since its amplitude allowed us to decompose and analyse 10 different years.

During the last decade, the application of electronics to the different components of HVAC systems has offered new and sophisticated control systems able to adapt the behaviour of each single device and of the whole plant to design specifications. These sophisticated finely-tuned control systems are, in principle, able to play an im-portant role in reducing energy consumption and im-proving thermal comfort. At the same time, there has been a marked increase in the complexity of the HVAC plant layout. Combining the complexity of plants with that of the control systems and taking into account the possibility of equipping each component of the plant with its own control system, the result is a new genera-tion of energy systems with many possible interactions between controllers. Hence it becomes impossible for a designer to evaluate, in an easy way, the effects of such interactions. As a consequence, it is difficult to know, at the design-stage, how the overall control system will op-erate. Nowadays, dynamic simulation of the complete HVAC system makes it possible to emulate the system in which the controllers operate. In this paper, the dynamic model of a basic HVAC system involving a condensing boiler, radiators with thermostatic valves and an inverter driven hydraulic pump is presented. Each element of the circuit is equipped with its own control. The model of the system has been built by using a custom-made library of Simulink blocks specifically created for the dynamic sim-ulation of controlled HVAC systems. The dynamic model will be used in order to underline the strong influence of the control system on the HVAC energy efficiency and thermal comfort conditions. Specific design rules limiting the negative interaction among the activated control sys-tems are inferred by the results shown in this paper.

In G. Pernigotto, F. Patuzzi, A. Prada, V. Corrado, & A. Gasparella (Eds.), Building Simulation Applications BSA 2019 (pp. 299���305).