Standard And Innovative Energy Improvement Strategies In School Buildings Through Numerical Analysis A case study in Italy

This paper deals with the energy saving strategies adopted in school buildings in Italy. It presents the energy requalification and the inner quality check of a school building in Southern Italy, as a case study. The authors carried out a dynamic simulation of the energy performance of the building through the soft-ware Design-Builder, based on data registered during the monitoring process. They calculated the main index of energy consumption with the aim to determine the most efficient energy saving strategies, considering the technical-economic possibilities too. The numerical analysis allowed evaluating the influence of dynamic/thermal properties of the building, comparing the behavior of five different vertical opaque existing envelopes. The paper shows how standard energy saving interventions, named low and medium-impact operations, are less effective than innovative high-impact ones that consider the possibility to increase the thermal mass of the envelopes, although with a higher economic effort. This is particularly true during winter and specifically in the considered climatic contest.