Giovanni Litti

Vleeshuis Museum: Antwerp (Belgium)

Understanding the indoor building microclimate means also verifying how the building interacts with the outdoor microclimate and how homogeneous this interaction is inside the building. As the hygrothermal dynamics influence both building users’ thermal comfort and state of conservation of movable heritage, it is essential, especially in historic buildings and museums, to combine both indoor building microclimate diagnosis and certification in an iterative process.

Buildings’ Indoor Microclimate Quality (IMQ): Assessment and Certification

Ensuring satisfactory indoor climate quality is a fundamental aspect of building management for both newly constructed and existing buildings. Moreover, as indoor microclimate quality (IMQ) plays a driving role in building energy consumptions and movable heritage preservation, its assessment and certification are fundamental in order to allow building control and optimization. In historic buildings, museums, or where indoor climate requirements should simultaneously satisfy people comfort and movable heritage safety, it is essential to propose assessment and certification methodologies capable of capturing the multidimensional nature of this management problem. Currently, a framework for guiding during IMQ assessment and certification, especially when different microclimate needs coexist, still lacks; this makes often the certification process inconsistent and arbitrary. In this contribution, after an overview on the collection microclimate management evolution, the critical aspects of the methodology to be taken into account during IMQ assessment and certification are discussed. Finally, an IMQ certification model is introduced.