Cristina Piselli

Traditional and Innovative Materials for Energy Efficiency in Buildings

This chapter shows the most recent and innovative contributions and research trends arounbd the wide issue of energy efficiency in buildings by means of passive techniques, such as new effective materials for building envelope optimization. In particular, cool materials will be dealt with by considering their capability to keep a surface cooler than other solutions when exposed to solar radiation. Then multifunctional materials such as thermal and acoustic insulation panels will be analyzed. Finbally, natural and biobased solutions for energy saving will be investigated. Each one of these topics will be studied by elaborating a first general assessment of each technique and then by analyzing the most recent contributions and research trends in order to provide a wide perspective of the question that is going to be addressed in this chapter.

Microclimate Mitigation for Reducing Summer Overheating in Historic Districts

The present work analyzes the local microclimate of different areas in central Italy, with particular attention to an historic district, by means of coupled experimental and numerical approach. Four different areas characterized by different boundary conditions in terms of buildings’ density, construction materials, and amount of greenery are selected as case study. The monitoring campaign shows how buildings’ density and greenery percentage are able to considerably affect the daily temperature ranges by generating a night cooling up to 5°C between dense urban areas and green suburban areas. Additionally, the urban area with the highest vegetation percentage presents the lowest temperature fluctuation, i.e. 16.1°C during the day, despite the highest sky view factor, due to the vegetation buffering effect. The numerical analysis highlights the major role of greenery in generating temperature drops in summer (i.e. -0.8°C). Key-words Urban microclimate; Urban Heat Island; Experimental monitoring; Microclimate simulation