Sustainable Renovation of Public Buildings through Seismic–Energy Upgrading: Methodology and Application to an RC School Building

Abstract

There are many existing buildings for which seismic rehabilitation interventions are required, especially in earthquake-prone areas like Italy. At the same time, the deep energy crisis that Europe is facing highlights the need for sustainable techniques that are able to increase the energy efficiency of buildings. In order to mitigate the social and cultural obstacles for deep renovations of buildings, effective techniques and methods are required to avoid relocating users, which often discourages such interventions. To this purpose and as the main novelty, this research is aimed at presenting a new strengthening technique for reinforced concrete buildings that is able to integrate structural seismic strengthening and energy efficiency improvements. It is made up of new framed structures connected from the outside to the existing building, thus reducing the intrusiveness and relocation needs of users. At the same time, the seismic strengthening technique is conceived for an optimal coupling with energy saving interventions like high-performance external insulation finishing systems. In this study, these techniques are described and applied to a reinforced concrete (RC) school building designed only for gravity loads, according to outdated standards. The results show that the considered strengthening technique increases the seismic performance of the building with respect to both life safety and damage limitation requirements, avoiding any further local interventions to the building’s interior. On the other hand, the energy renovation allows for significant savings, since the resulting reduction in the total non-renewable energy consumption is larger than 80%.