Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Benefits of Refurbishment
Marina Mistretta, Marco Beccali, Maurizio Cellura, Francesco
Guarino and Sonia Longo
Abstract Energy and environmental performances of buildings strictly depend on
many factors related to the choice of construction materials, HVAC plants and
equipment, design, installation and use. By definition, a building interacts closely
with its environment. The interactions between building and climate, plants and
users have to be taken into account. This aspect is evident in new buildings design
process, but it is even more important in the design phase of an existing building
renovation, during which actions of energy saving are developed. This chapter
summarises the results of the energy and environmental assessment of a set of
retrofit actions implemented in the framework of the EU Project 'BRITA in PuBs'.
The main goals were to improve building energy and environmental performances
following a life-cycle approach and to support the project partners to select the
retrofit actions involving the highest energy saving and the lowest environmental
impacts. Synthetic indices, as energy and GWP payback times, and energy return
ratio, are defined to better describe the energy and environmental performances of
the actions. The use of the life-cycle approach was very successful and potentially
transferable to other contexts of building retrofit study.
1 Introduction
The annual balance for operating energy or carbon emissions has been the goal of
different building projects implemented in many European countries. This topic
has been adopted by politics to define strategies of energy saving and climate
