Alessandro Righi

Energetic and Functional Upgrading of School Buildings

In Italy, currently most schools require improvements to energy performance and indoor air quality. On the other hand, school buildings require structural assessment and strong renovation interventions to maintain their service functionality. Moreover, the use of spaces should be reviewed and redesigned to be more compatible with modern educational models, making the schools unique integrated spaces. Each space should have the same dignity and flexibility, meeting anticipated future needs and expectations and offering a positive environment that should support learning, teaching and recreational activities. The national government has recently launched policies and plans to face up to this situation, imposing some guidelines to incentivise the actions of local municipalities. The challenge as well as the aim of this research is to verify the possibility of combining energy retrofits with functional renovations as a unique approach to taking action, exploring the conditions and measures to create synergy. As a case study, school buildings in a medium-sized city, Castelfranco Veneto, in the north-eastern part of Italy were analyzed with the aim of defining a method of intervention on different functional layouts. In a first phase of the work, all 21 schools present in the area were analyzed. Subsequently, three groups of buildings with homogeneous characteristics in terms of age, construction technologies, and shape factors were identified. Finally, a case study for each group was analyzed in detail and a proposal for improvements to the energy efficiency and functionality was presented. In this chapter, one of the case studies is presented.

Evaluation of Thermal Performance, Environmental Impact, and Cost Effectiveness of an XLam Component for Retrofitting in Existing Buildings

Renovation and retrofitting of residential buildings is a subject of great concern in Italy: most of the existing building stock is completely inappropriate in terms of structural rigidity in the event of earthquakes and with respect to the objectives of energy efficiency set by European law. This research presents the design of an innovative system of structural reinforcement using cross-laminated timber (CLT) technology based on materials with environmental compatibility: an XLam panel comes attached to a metal structure in the outside or inside layer of the external wall of an existing building; the stratigraphy also includes the insertion of insulation, a net of new systems (hydraulic and thermal), and new window frames. The new component is studied for modularization and standardization to ensure simplicity and speed of installation, low cost of providing, and assembly. The research focuses on aspects related to building physics and sustainability in construction in order to optimize the choice of materials: analyses of performance were conducted and simulations performed on various kinds of insulation materials in order to determine the best possible configuration in terms of thermal performance, environmental impact, and cost effectiveness. The results were verified with the construction of a prototype checked by a thermal test. Finally, with the obtained data the renovation of a case study building with different measures of intervention is verified.