Abstract
The causal relation among building typology and building energy demand is a complex balance of climate, morphology, technology and use. The assessment of the relation between mass of building elements and energy demand in different housing typologies is the main goal of this study. A novel indicator, namely the Buildingmass, is introduced and tested in the Mediterranean climate region. Explorations on nine conventional housing typologies in Barcelona and Rome are carried out. Buildingmass evaluation is based on the calculation of the mass of building elements. Energy demand is assessed by modelling on multi-space dynamic thermal analysis tool. Our results point out that the Buildingmass has a strong relevance on energy, playing an important role in reducing heating and cooling demand in the Mediterranean city, as described by the proposed correlation (R2 = 0.88). Moreover, this indicator gives a more detailed characterisation of the housing stock of the Mediterranean city. The study aims at bridging the gap between urban physics and urban metabolism studies and fostering energy conservation measures for the built environment.
Highlights
In recent years, the complex interaction of urban environment, climate and energy performance of buildings has drawn the attention of researchers from different fields, aiming at exploring acute and actual challenges of cities and making human settlement sustainable, resilient, safe and inclusive [1]
This study focuses on the building’s compartment, which is subdivided into physical elements and wants to give a more precise estimation of their mass using the Buildingmass indicator (BM) indicator
We explore the relation between BM and energy for heating and cooling in the Mediterranean cities and give a detailed characterisation of the housing stock focusing on conventional building typology archetypes, useful for bottom-up energy analysis at the district scale
Summary
The complex interaction of urban environment, climate and energy performance of buildings has drawn the attention of researchers from different fields, aiming at exploring acute and actual challenges of cities and making human settlement sustainable, resilient, safe and inclusive [1]. Member States are required to establish a roadmap to decarbonise their national building stock up to 95% reduction of GHG emissions by 2050, with a specific milestone within 2030 [3] Achieving this goal in the cities of the Mediterranean region firstly requires considerable efforts to estimate the building energy performance in relation to different features of the urban texture and, in particular, of the housing that is the core component of urban systems and is responsible for 65% of final energy consumption [4]. On the other side, moving from micro to meso-scale, building physics and urban physics propose approaches to understand the energy-related characteristics of the building stock in order to define successful strategies of energy conservation measures [6] Both make use of indicators to express the urban complexity in a synthetic way and try to determine their relevance and suitability in describing features of specific elements that presently make up cities. This work does not pretend to find an exact law on the relation between BM and energy demand but rather to give an overview of the general trends that are possible to highlight between these two variables, beyond the specific cases and the peculiarities of the selected housing typologies
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