Tiziano Dalla Mora

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.

The process of integrated energy and environmental audit on historic buildings

Building design needs to consider that lifetime of its products will likely face environmental and socioeconomical changes, and cannot neglect the limits imposed by the geo-biosphere – which is at the same time provider of resources and tank for the waste of our economies. Taking action to face such limits beyond trendy, debatable “green-washing” policies can be either a forward-looking choice or rather something imposed by necessity. The latter is the premise – for instance – of an Italian collaboration between humanitarian NGO Emergency Onlus and architecture studio TAMassociati in designing hospitals in the African regions of Sahara and Sahel: according to Pantaleo & Strada (2011), many African countries – with their ability to live together with scarcity – represent an example, an opportunity to meditate on some alternative to the mainstream development model, time to time reinventing the thigs. Vernacular building techniques are revisited towards a low-tech innovation that, in a next future, could turn out to be useful also for Western architecture. Some traditional solutions from Sudan and other Countries are here reviewed under a systemic point of view, and presented with the evaluation of their potential advantages in terms of long-term socio-environmental sustainability. 1. Building design within the limits of scarcity In order to be sustainable and lasting, i.e., able to resist current and future environmental and socio-economical changes, design needs to acknowledge and face such changes. This appears as a particularly suitable good practice when designing buildings, above all buildings that will host services of public interest, since their lifetime is generally projected as far as into the next 50 or 100 years. This implies at least to concede that fewer and fewer resources might be available by then. Although they seem not to have been listened to, the first major warnings about the biophysical limits to growth date back to the Seventies of the twentieth century (Commoner, 1971; Georgescu-Roegen, 1971; Meadows et al., 1972; Gorz, 1977). Unfortunately, the limits to the access of resources are not only biophysical, insofar as they involve social consequences such as social inequality, human exploitation, misery and conflicts. Currently, the notion of limit is mainly addressed in talking about the emission of greenhouse gases, and trendy architecture design claims to be taking action by “greening” the balconies or the facades of some yet energyand resource-demanding steel-and-glass tall buildings. Energy efficiency is more and more addressed, but does not necessarily gives rise to a reduction in energy consumption – in agreement with Jevon’s well-known paradox (1865) – being mostly fit in a framework of an increasing general demand. Inside an average Global Northern household, for instance, one might find: heating and air conditioning to have summer temperatures in winter, and viceversa; limitless phone and internet plans to call, share electronic documents, and surf the net ad libitum through the most diverse electronic devices, which are replacing books besides regularly replacing themselves due to their planned obsolescence, and so on. In general, the issue of reducing the need for energy and materials altogether is rarely addressed, and a systemic vision is still lacking. This is typical of the so-called “green economy” and “sustainable development”, both pursuing economic growth while ignoring scarcity. However, based on the aforementioned changes, in the near future also the Global North might be led to become familiar with the unknown (or unseen) concept of scarcity. 2. African dry regions to imagine alternatives to development An interesting way to address the (likely) possiblity of such a problematic scenario of scarcity is to measure ourselves with a context where scarcity is the rule, for instance, Saharian and Sahelian regions in Africa. In the following sections, some reflections are presented on a healthcare facility we have been investigating in those areas, namely, the Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery at the outskirts of Khartoum, Sudan, run and built by Italian humanitarian NGO Emergency . Comments are addressed on the forward-looking hybrid solutions employed, based on vernacular building technologies. According to Raul Pantaleo, co-founder of architecture studio TAMassociati 2 and designer for Emergency, as well as to Gino Strada (2011), co-founder and executive director of the same NGO, Africa can “paradoxically be a laboratory for all the planet, because it can still co-exist – creatively and often lightly – [...] with those conditions that the West could need to face in the near future”. Building in such a context might represent an opportunity to meditate on an alternative to the mainstream development model, to restart from scratch, where everything is to be reinvented (ibid.). 3. The Salam Centre: an introduction to Sudanese case study The Salam Centre for Cardiac Surgery was built between 2004 and 2007 by Emergency NGO, based on a design by architecture studio TAMassociati and in collaboration with the Sudanese Ministry of Health. Fig. 1 shows the main facade of the hospital. It provides free healthcare to heart patients coming from over 20 countries, being the only hospital of its kind offering free services in Sub-Saharian Africa. The aim of the organisation has been to bring high quality specialistic healthcare – at the same standards as European or United States hospitals – in a deprived area. This choice has often undergone criticism for cost-opportunity reasons, including possible alternative investments to tackle hunger, malnutrition, and primary care instead of highly specialised surgery. By the way, this kind of criticism seems not to take care of the hugely more relevant global and local investements that are the cause of hunger and malnutrition worldwide. However, the proposing organisation has always claimed that healthcare – including specialised one – is a universal right, wherever you are from. The Salam Centre is located in Soba, 20 km south of Sudan’s capital city Khartoum; it takes up an area of 12,000 squared metres indoor on a lot of nearly 40,000 squared metres on the shores of the Blue Nile river. In the words of our contact person from Emergency NGO’s humanitarian office, the main driver of the hospital planning and construction phases was just ethics. We are actually carrying on a more extended investigation project to find whether this ethics also brings environmental benefits, as well as to track possible positive or crucial consequencies in the society. This will be 1 http://www.emergency.it/index.html 2 http:// http://www.tamassociati.org/ 3 http://salamcentre.emergency.it/En/005/The+Regional+Network.html 4 http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-controversial-oasis-of-health-care 5 http://salamcentre.emergency.it/En/002/Il+Centro+Salam.html done under a systemic point of view, in particular, by means of the emergy accounting method. Fig. 1: A detail of the façade of the Salam Centre (photo by architect Raul Pantaleo) 4. Low-energy, frugal technologies While designing and building its structure, on the left bank of Blue Nile, vernacular solutions and elements were employed, thus merging both the main approaches described by De Filippi and Battistella for architectural projects international cooperation (2014). We will focus on some of the vernacular building techniques, which were revisited towards a low-tech innovation that, in a next future, could turn out to be suitable also for Western architecture. In the hospital site region, annual average temperature is 45°C. According to Pantaleo (2007), as a cardio-surgical hospital the Salam Centre requires 20°C in its operating theatres, and 24°C in its intensive care rooms, so air conditioning by conventional systems would mean a huge consumption of electric and fossil energy. Despite the oil reserves in the country, Emergency NGO decided to provide new, strategically systainable systems based on renewables. This would happen in the same spirit of building a top quality hospital just as it was to be built in any country of the Global North. Therefore, the main energy source available was chosen, the sun (ibid.). First of all, passive mitigation techniques were employed to reduce the building energy demand for air conditioning. This was pursued through: i. the construction of 58-cm external walls with multiple layers of local full bricks, and paneled, insulated air chambers in between (Pantaleo, 2007); ii. the installation of small double-glass windows protected by sun-screening films; iii. the extensive planting of the land around the hospital with trees and hedges to screen the area from the absorbtion of solar radiation (thus providing environmental mitigation through indirectly resorting to the other local resource available: the Blue Nile’s water, used to irrigate these green areas); iv. the screening of the porticos around the building with panels of loosely twined vegetable fibres (from a local plant similar to a palm), refunctionalising a Sudanese technique used to build beds (as in Figure 2). 6 http://salamcentre.emergency.it/En/002/004/002/Against+heat.html Fig. 2: A detail of the porticos of the Salam Centre with the twined vegetal panels on the left and the small double-screen windows on the right (photo by Emergency NGO) Such passive mitigation solutions helped reducing the requirements of the hospital, in terms of both financial and environmental costs for its construction, operation, and maintenance. Active solutions to chill the structures consist in a system based on 288 vacuum-sealed solar collectors (covering an area of 900 squared metres). The following information about these solar panels is based on data from Emergency NGO, directly provided to us by its technical division, also summarised and published on the Salam Centre’s website. The solar collectors system is able to “cleRoad transportation is one of the most polluting as well as energy-intensive sectors, and requires planning policies capable to address at the same time several different environmental, social, and economic issues. Cost-benefit analyses are generally carried out with a major focus on fuelling and driving efficiency, whereas a systemic approach appears to be needed for a more comprehensive evaluation of the alternatives that may become available to address any issue, be it intended for either short-term or long-term spans. For instance, building up a new infrastructure might allow for savings in time or fuel per km, but this may require an equivalent or even higher socio-environmental investment. In this work, a short review is presented of some systemic studies on transportation that use the emergy synthesis methodology. A case study is also addressed, concerning recent important expansion works on the Apennine Mountains section of the Italian major highway A1. In particular, the analysis points out the role of time saving, since for a new or renewed transport infrastructure (and when comparing for example road to rail transport) saved time is likely to become crucial in justifying civil enterprises. Nevertheless, the present emergy synthesis and the teaching of H.T. Odum (Odum & Odum, 2001) warn us that such “luxury” highly depends on the abundance of available energy, which is less and less given for granted, whereas a systemic analysis approach may indicate different levels of criticality when oriented towards environmental and well-being issues. 1. Road transport: which approaches for a problematic sector? The increasing energy demand and the polluting, climate change related emissions are widely considered among the main environmental issues for the XXI Century. In this framework, the transportation sector plays a primary role both in energy use and in pollutant emissions. In 2015, transports accounted for over 28% of the total energy use in the United States of America, and for the 70% of the country total petroleum consumption (equivalent to almost 15% of the world petroleum consumption in 2014), with more than 80% of the U.S. transportation energy use coming from highway vehicles (Davis et al., 2016). In 2015, highway vehicles were responsible for the 39% of the total carbon monoxide (CO) emissions and for the 36% of the nitrogen oxides (NOX) released in the U.S. (EPA, 2016). Although at a smaller scale, percentages in Italy appear even more dramatic: in 2014, over 39% of the national total energy use was related to the transportation sector (MISE, 2015), with on-road vehicles being responsible for the 23% of the total CO emissions and for the 50% of the total NOX emissions (ISPRA, 2016). But whilst the problem is quite clearly addressed, the strategies for its overcoming are not. Facing transportation issues requires planning policies capable to address at the same time several different environmental, social, and economic aspects. Cost-benefit analyses are generally carried out with a major focus on fuelling and driving efficiency, whereas a systemic approach and the https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/processes/tools/toolbox/methodologies/costbenefit_overview.cfm enlargement of the analytical boundaries appears to be needed 2 for a more comprehensive evaluation of the alternatives that may become available to address any issue, be it intended for either short-term or long-term spans. For instance, building up a new infrastructure might allow for savings in time or fuel per kilometre, but this may require an equivalent or even higher socio-environmental investment, which is hardly measurable by money – or at least quite indirectly. Emergy accounting (Odum, 1996) offers a great opportunity to account for environmental and labour/services costs and benefits at the same time, while addressing systemic interconnections and hierarchies. The limited available literature on emergy accounting applied to transportation has been reviewed, as described in Section 3. Emergy accounting is applied to an Italian case study, as illustrated in a forthcoming extended study (Cristiano, Gonella, & Ulgiati). Besides a short presentation of the state-of-the-art of the topic, this work discusses on how to frame the societal “value” and the socioenvironmental “cost” of saved time in Odum and Odum’s reasoning on a prosperous way down (2001) perspective. 2. Emergy accounting in a nutshell In recent years, starting from the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, social and economic), the search for comprehensive integrated indicators of sustainability has been developing following various different approaches. What is needed to fully understand a system performance is an integrated approach capable to evaluate a process from two complementary points of view at the same time, namely, a “userside” assessment that looks at final efficiency indicators (energy delivered per unit of energy input, emissions per unit of energy, and so on) along with a “donor-side” framework, that considers the work done by the supporting ecosystemic and social/productive environment in providing resources. The term “EMERGY” is derived from the expression “EMbodied enERGY”. The foundations of emergy analysis are the main scientific output of the work by Howard T. Odum (Odum, 1996; 2000; Odum & Brown, 2007). Starting in the 1970’s, Odum structured and applied the emergy analysis over a surprisingly wide range of systems (see Brown & Ulgiati, 2004) within several disciplines, among which complexity science, ecology, economics, informatics, geo-bio-physics, sociology and so on. The emergy, defined as the available energy of one kind that is used up in transformations directly and indirectly to make a product or service (Odum 1996), may be regarded as a sort of “memory” of what has been invested, in terms of energy involved either directly or indirectly, to realise something. Emergy represents the common unit (defined along with a proper algebra) for accounting at the same time all the quantities, flows and processes that concur in defining the system at issue. The unit of emegy is the solar emjoule,in the case of solar energy reference. The emergy of a resource will include all the upstream and downstream contributions provided by both the environment and the anthropic activities necessary to maintain that resource. The emergy approach takes quantitatively into account within the same unit all the flows, namely, matter, energy, information and money, so putting into the same technical-scientific analysis also quantities not computable in terms of money or energy units, that are therefore typically neglected in economic or energetic analyses. The general methodology for the emergy analysis of a system is typically organised in 2 http://bca.transportationeconomics.org/published-guidance-and-references the fundamental steps: 1. Build up of an emergetic diagram of the system; 2. Preparation of an inventory table for the flows; 3. Determination of the corresponding emergy values; 4. Calculation of suitable emergetic indicators for the analysis interpretation. The elements of the emergy diagrams are mutuated from the formal and graphical language used by engineers for energy networks (Odum, 1996). Starting from the emergetic diagram, all data for the respective flows are converted in emergy units by means of their respective Unit Emergy Values (UEVs), which are given by the emergy required to generate an output unit, be it made of mass, energy, labour, money, and so on, independently of the renewability of inputs. 3. On the prosperous way down The Prosperous Way Down outlined by the Odums frames a possible scenario for the future of the humanity, where the depletion of nonrenewable fossil energy sources may lead to a society living on fewer resources but at the same time that may be prosperous as well. To pursue this, human activities should follow an epistemological picture based on a donor-side perspective, like that substantiated by the emergy analysis, that may indicate in a scientific manner how to try modifying the economy and keeping the environment prosperous as resources become more and more limited. Odum pointed out several features of modern society that must undergo a profound change, among which the transport sector plays a role in as much it is related to several human activities of a global society that produces and consumes as much fossil fuels as possible, mostly for private interests strongly intertwined with global politics. Among the indications for a prosperous way down, some are of particular interest for the topic at issue (Odum & Odum, 2006), namely: • Decrease in urban concentration, based on the fact that the concentration of economic enterprises and people in cities is ultimately based on the availability of inexpensive fuels. • Re-shaping of the automobile culture, by reducing the number of cars as well as unnecessary horsepower. • Communication replacing transportation, whenever an activity does not require physical displacement of matter. All of these aspects require that the whole economy re-shapes its basic postulates concerning the use of fossil fuels, still allowed and promoted at the global level despite any environmental concern. In this sense, a bottom-up approach may regard the local level, and so the analysis presented in this contribution. 4. Emergy accounting and transportation The literature reporting emergy accounting approaches for road transportation systems is quite limited. Roudebush (1996) focused on the comparison between the different costs and impacts of concrete versus asphalt road pavements; Brown & Vivas (2005) tangentially addressed transportation infrastructures while incorportating roads (specifically, their empower density) in the calculation of the Landscape Development Intensity index of a given territory; Reza et al. first used paved roads as a case study to investigate the uncertainties in emThis paper presents a relatively simple procedure to examine the responsiveness of energy demand to measures of economic activity and electricity price. We estimate the demand function for electric ...