Andrea Gasparella

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

This study examines the influence of temperature and noise on autistic individuals. Conventional indoor comfort questionnaires as well as pre-validated attentional tests were administered to autistic and typically developed individuals across six different environmental scenarios. Results showed that autistic individuals struggled with completing c...

Leveraging advanced simulation processes and optimization algorithms, this research aims to enhance energy performance and daylight harvesting for a case-study building, the Bullitt Center, Seattle, Washington, U.S.. Specifically, it studies the role of shading devices to conserve energy. Central to this research is the utilization of simulation pr...

Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects, intensified by growing urbanization, significantly impact thermal comfort and energy demand in cities. To accurately model these effects in building performance and urban energy simulations, precise weather data and boundary conditions are essential. Although weather stations in city centers are increasingly used to...

Modern glazing systems, including triple-glazing with integrated blinds and advanced façade technologies, exhibit complex thermal behaviors that traditional metrics like the Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) and the thermal transmittance (U-value) inadequately capture. This paper introduces novel Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for assessing the...

Accurate prediction of Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) is crucial for optimizing solar power generation systems, especially in mountainous regions characterized by complex topography and specific microclimates. These areas face significant challenges due to limited availability of reliable data and accuracy issues stemming from the dynamic natur...

In the wake of the worsening of the energy crisis in winter 2022, several public administrations in Italy recommended simple energy systems operation control measures, to be implemented in the local building stock to reduce energy consumption and produce economic savings in the short term. In particular, in the municipality of Bolzano, Italy, these...

Although building energy renovation is a priority in the decarbonization strategy of the European Union, the implementation of conventional deep energy retrofit measures is often challenging when it comes to historical buildings, to which dedicated laws for heritage preservation apply. Furthermore, this building category represents a relevant share...

Urban Building Energy Modelling UBEM tools usually adopt conventional weather data that do not consider the impact of the urban context on the local climate conditions, e.g., the Urban Heat Island effect. In this study, the influence of the use of urban microclimate data on UBEM results was investigated considering a set of 5 synthetic district mor...

We typically rely on fictitious years of weather data, i.e., reference years, to carry out energy analyses in representative climate conditions, since multi-year assessments of the building energy performance are computationally demanding and complete weather data series are available for a limited number of locations. In order to investigate this...

The design of renewable energy communities requires multi-disciplinary approaches to identify the most promising solutions from technical, economic, and environmental perspectives. Indeed, different simulations tools can be adopted, ranging from urban modelling to energy planning methods. In this framework, this research focused on the Santa Chiara...

The acoustic performance of access floors resting on concrete slabs has been long investigated. When such flooring solutions are used on lightweight construction systems, estimates of impact sound insulation improvements cannot be transferred without relevant loss of accuracy. To gain understanding on such behaviour, an experimental campaign has be...

Representative weather data are fundamental to characterizing a place and determining ideal design approaches. This is particularly important for large countries like Brazil, whose extension and geographical position contribute to defining diverse climatic conditions along the territory. In this context, this study intends to characterize the Brazi...

In the wake of the worsening of the energy crisis in winter 2022, several Italian public administrations defined general operation measures to implement in their buildings, aiming at achieving energy and economic savings in the short-term, often without the possibility to assess potential negative impacts on indoor environmental quality. In this co...

This study introduces a novel Hybrid Random Forest-Symbolic Regression model for precise prediction of hourly solar irradiance in mountainous and urban regions. Leveraging geostationary satellite imagery and on-site measurements, the proposed model shows a good performance in accurately predicting solar irradiance, even under challenging conditions...

The accurate prediction of global horizontal irradiance (GHI) is crucial for optimizing solar power generation systems, particularly in mountainous areas with complex topography and unique microclimates. These regions face significant challenges due to limited reliable data and the dynamic nature of local weather conditions, which complicate accura...

Timber is growing more popular as a construction material nowadays. Indeed, it is sustainable, user-friendly and widely available. However, homeowners of timber buildings still complain of perceived indoor noise, specifically upon impact. Thus far, very little research has been conducted into this issue. This paper reports the results of the acoust...

Low-income families often live in poorly heated houses belonging to social housing programs. Tenants’ wellbeing and health in social housing is typically threatened by problems associated with energy inefficiency and poor Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ). These conditions are among the symptoms of a social issue known as Energy Poverty (EP), whic...

During the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic situation, millions of high school students in Italy had to adapt a room in their home for partial distance learning. This paper investigates the thermal perception and satisfaction with the thermal conditions expressed by 45 teenage students alternating between Distance Learning (DL) and Face-to-face learning...

Advancements in machine learning have faciliated its use in many domains. In this work we apply it to building sector, where mechanical ventilation systems are prevalent. While natural ventilation still can be suitable in many situations, the difficulty in estimating airflows and long computational simulation times prevents its adoption. Since vent...

Since Urban Building Energy Modeling and Multi-Objective Optimization require large computational resources, both could benefit of simplification techniques able also to make them more affordable to professionals. In this work, the capabilities of a simplification algorithm for urban scale application are assessed in the context of the optimization...

The increase of the energy efficiency of the building stock is a national priority, especially in consideration of the recent energy crisis and of the 2050 decarbonisation goals of the European Union. Public buildings, in particular, are expected to lead the way and give examples of best practices and solutions for energy savings, some of them rela...

The recent 2022 energy crisis has pushed several Italian public administrations to adopt solutions to reduce energy demand for space heating in public buildings. Reduction of HVAC system operation time, decrease of heating setpoint and changes to ventilation schedules are some examples of typically implemented measures. However, some of them are in...

Since Urban Building Energy Modeling and Multi-Objective Optimization require large computational resources, both could benefit of simplification techniques able also to make them more affordable to professionals. In this work, the capabilities of a simplification algorithm for urban scale application are assessed in the context of the optimization...

Nel contesto di progettazione e riqualificazione del parco costruito, la simulazione dinamica è un importante strumento che può aiutare a ridurre i costi e i tempi di progettazione, migliorando la qualità e l'affidabilità del risultato finale. Tuttavia, l'utilizzo di software di simulazione richiede conoscenze specifiche, competenze avanzate, infor...

Data la recente crisi energetica, nuove soluzioni volte a ridurre il fabbisogno di riscaldamento degli ambienti sono state adottate in edifici pubblici e privati. In questa ricerca, un gruppo di uffici in un nuovo edificio a Bolzano è stato scelto come caso di studio per analizzare i risparmi energetici potenziali da controlli avanzati dei sistemi...

This study investigated the representativeness of Test Reference Year (TRY) for the estimation of the performance of a system with photovoltaic (PV) modules and a battery energy storage system (BESS) in a high performance building. According to the technical standard EN ISO 15927-4:2005, the TRY is an artificial year made of 12 actual months select...

In this work, the effect of two radiation modeling techniques on the performance of a simplification shoeboxing algorithm for Urban and Building Energy Modeling is studied. The simplified shoebox models consider the building’s self-shadings and context obstructions as equivalent obstructing surfaces replacing part of the windows, whose sizes are ob...

This study presents a novel methodology using machine learning (ML) and 3D GIS building models to assess solar irradiance on building envelopes in complex urban and mountain environments. Four ML models were developed to predict hourly global horizontal solar irradiance (GHI), ensemble modelling and stacking techniques were employed for their combi...

The well-documented potential of polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) glazing in building façade applications and the lack of detailed optical modelling represents a significant research gap. This work presents a detailed optical model of PDLC glazing, capable of accurately reproducing its characteristics, such as scattering in the translucent s...

In recent years, public authorities around the world have used incentive strategies to encourage the renovation of the existing building stock to meet the set carbon neutrality targets. However, the design of the incentives typically does not consider that the subsidized energy efficiency measures should result in robust long-term improvements with...

The "shoeboxing" algorithm is a simplification approach capable of converting a building of any shape into a representative shoebox, with the aim of speeding-up Urban Building Energy Modeling simulations. The procedure works towards accurately predicting both annual energy needs and hourly thermal loads, going beyond the preliminary assessment of b...

Window operation is the main strategy used by building occupants to naturally ventilate buildings. However, common approaches to measure window operation for energy and comfort assessments are still technically complex or insufficient; typical window open/close sensors often provide only binary information about the opening state of a window, not t...

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has increased the general awareness of the importance of proper ventilation in the indoor environment to reduce the contagion risk. In particular, attention has been paid to specific categories of buildings, such as schools, due to two factors: (1) high occupancy density and (2) the presence of young and sometimes mor...

Complex Fenestration Systems with integrated shading systems are becoming widely used to enhance the building's envelope performance and increase the occupants' thermal and visual comfort. Their peculiarity of integrating a complex shading system makes it difficult to assess their thermal and optical performance. The complexity of the shading syste...

People on the autism spectrum have a different perception of the environment than neurotypical people and often require support in various activities of daily living. Assistive technology can support those affected, but very few smart-home-like technologies exist. To support people on the autism spectrum in their autonomy and safety and to help car...

Autistic people, their families or caregivers need design processes capable of overcoming the difficulties of everyday life. In 2020, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention reported that approximately 1 out of 54 children in the U.S. is diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder. Buildings are designed to provide a suitable living and learni...

One challenge for railway noise predictions is to characterize noise from various auxiliary equipment, e.g., fans, compressors, transformers. The noise from such sources can be a dominating contribution under low speed operation or stand still. To better handle this problem the EU-project TRANSIT investigates improved methods for acoustic source ch...

Urban scale simulation is recognized to have a significant potential for the estimation of buildings’ thermal behavior and energy performance at district or city scale. However, many modeling approaches, such as Urban Building Energy Modeling, are particularly demanding from the computational point of view. In order to reduce the time required for...

The present study applies an approach to analyze the stress induced on people on the autism condition. Dedicated questionnaires were prepared, in order to guarantee an inclusive participation and then applied by means of two different surveys in living and extended care unit environments. Results permit to highlight that: (i) the four comfort domai...

Variations of environmental parameters, like thermo-hygrometric, acoustic, visual and indoor air quality can influence the sensitivities of individuals on the spectrum. This paper presents research on this issue, studied by means of questionnaires administered to parents and professional caregivers taking care of people with Autism Spectrum Disorde...

When studying occupants' environmental perception of well-being in indoor spaces, subjective questionnaires are most often used to evaluate indoor comfort domains. When estimating parameters which can be influenced in some way by certain visual aspects, researchers may question if the obtained results could be affected by other issues. In particula...

In recent years, the presence of green timber buildings has increased significantly in the construction market. People are increasingly requesting them, but designers still hold certain personal beliefs and seem to lack confidence. This is a research problem since this could also be caused by a lack of education. Thus, the main aim of this work is...

Social houses built after the Second World War to accommodate workers and low-income families represent one of the major energy consumers and greenhouse gas emitters in the residential sector. Plans for their renovation are underway in all European countries, and the process is more complicated for Italian cities due to the lack of space and the la...

Building energy simulations are a key tool to design high performance buildings capable of facing the future challenges, to help reaching the emissions reduction targets. Currently, thermal properties of materials used in most building energy simulations are assumed to be constant and not dependent from moisture content and temperature. Heat and mo...

In the framework of Urban Building Energy Modeling, several procedures have been proposed to reduce the computational burden to evaluate the thermal behavior of multiple buildings. In a previous work, we presented a novel simplification algorithm capable of abstracting a randomly-shaped building into a representative shoebox. Differently from most...

Foams are commonly used as sound absorbers and thermal insulators for many industrial and construction applications. The insulating materials market is currently dominated by inorganic fibres like glass and mineral wool, as well as plastic foams. However, worldwide plastics consumption produces huge amounts of waste, generating concerns about soil,...

To reduce greenhouse gases emissions related to the building sector and to make informed decisions about sustainable building design and urban planning, building energy simulation should be adopted as a supporting tool by designers and policy makers. However, since building simulation is extremely time-consuming, its application is limited in daily...

Urban Building Energy Modeling and Multi-Objective Optimization are two very computationally intensive applications of Building Performance Simulation. In this research, a simplification algorithm developed to speed up thermal simulations at urban scale was tested to assess its performance in optimization studies. Since the algorithm showed good ac...

The energy needs for space cooling are becoming a significant share of the energy balance of different Member States of the European Union, in particular the Mediterranean countries. This trend has been observed and monitored by the European Union, which has started a number of initiatives to promote the reduction in the energy demand for space coo...

Even if many studies in the literature confirm that the thermal properties of several building materials are highly affected by the material’s temperature and moisture content, it is common practice in building performance simulation to adopt constant properties, such as thermal conductivity. Those values are usually estimated according to the tech...

Indoor environmental quality in educational buildings is recognized as a crucial aspect for the achievement of the learning outcomes for students. Nevertheless, indoor school conditions are often found unsatisfactory in several European countries, including Italy, especially as regards indoor air quality IAQ. For instance, taking CO2 concentration...

The ongoing covid-19 pandemic has drawn the attention on the importance of providing adequate fresh air to the occupants of the built environment, in particular in educational buildings. Higher ventilation rates and personal protection devices like facial masks are among the strategies and procedures to reduce the infection risk, allowing the fruit...

Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) is a building technology that is becoming increasingly popular due to its sustainable and eco-friendly nature, as well as its availability. Nevertheless, CLT presents some challenges, especially in terms of impact noise and airborne sound insulation. For this reason, many studies focus on the vibro-acoustic behavior of...

In recent years, the use of sustainable construction materials has increased significantly. It is of paramount importance to increase the general knowledge of acoustic behaviour of these materials. This research presents the results of a comprehensive acoustic investigation of a 200 mm timber slab. Excitations using different acoustic sources are p...

Extensive literature exists on the use of dynamic shading devices for the control of visual and thermal comfort in non-residential buildings, however research in the residential sector is far less widespread. Several control strategies and thresholds are utilised in literature, yet it is unclear how these should be chosen. The aim of this work is t...

Engineered wood constructions and timber buildings are rapidly developing, while the numerical techniques usable for their sound insulation properties are various and often still under development. This research constitutes a first step towards the reliability determination of building acoustics simulations on timber-based elements. A small scale r...

This study focuses on the control of movable Venetian blinds. Multiple improvements to an existing on/off open-loop control strategy in a case-study apartment have been simulated in TRNSYS 18, thanks to the detailed optical and thermal modelling allowed by the Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function (BSDF) used as input to the Type56_CFS. Th...

Nearly-zero energy buildings are now a standard for new constructions. However, the real challenge for a decarbonized society relies in the renovation of the existing building stock, selecting energy efficiency measures considering not only the energy performance but also the economic and sustainability ones. Even if the literature is full of examp...

In this work, a parametric analysis was performed with the aim to improve the shoebox definition from the real building characteristics. Besides conventional thermophysical and geometrical properties, context-related features were considered. To perform a multi-variate sensitivity analysis, several configurations of shoeboxes were simulated in the...

This research discusses two different types of extreme weather data for building simulation, the Extreme Reference Years ERYs and the eXtreme Meteorological Years XMYs, with the aim of performing a comparison analysing their impact on the assessment of building energy performance. A dataset of 12 climates is used to generate both typical and extrem...

In this research, we performed extensive building energy simulations to assess the representativeness of a methodology for climate clustering and representative climate identification, previously proposed by the authors and applied, as an example, to a dataset of more than 300 European climates. Descriptive and non-parametric statistics were exploi...

Not many studies regarding comfort in physiotherapy centers are present in literature. These facilities host both therapists and patients, who can have different age and health status and perform different activities. For this reason, the assessment of indoor environment can be difficult, and models available in technical standards and in the liter...

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly modified our urban territories. One of the most strongly affected parameters was outdoor noise, caused by traffic and human activity in general, all of which were forced to stop during the spring of 2020. This caused an indubitable noise reduction both inside and outside the home. This study investigates how peop...

Nowadays, there is a vast need to calculate performances of timber constructions. Usually, simulations are implemented to predict buildings elements final performances. Here, the thermal and acoustic parameters necessary to simulate the performances of timber buildings elements are investigated. These data are need as input information for simulati...

The ongoing pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus is challenging many aspects of daily life. Several personal protective devices have become essential in our lives. Face protections are mostly used in order to stop the air aerosol coming out of our mouths. Nevertheless, this fact may also have a negative effect on speech transmission both in outdoo...

The use of timber constructions recently increased. In particular, Cross Laminated Timber floors are often used in multi-story buildings. The development of standardization processes, product testing, design of details and joints, the speed of construction, and the advantages of eco-sustainability are the main reasons why these structures play a pa...

Climate classification plays an important role for the identification of homogeneous groups of climates, from which representative locations can be extracted and used for building energy simulation analyses. Nevertheless, according to the current state-of-the-art, the main reference systems consider just a fraction of those weather quantities which...

Urban Building Energy Modeling aims at assessing the building energy performance at city scale with as little computational effort as possible. Thus, different methods have been developed in the last years to reduce the required calculation time by simplifying the modeling approach, selecting only representative buildings, or minimizing the buildin...

Building retrofit design aims at achieving a certain low energy target at a minimum cost. However, these buildings tend to be less comfortable than expected, prone to overheating, poor air quality, and less resilient towards different user profiles. Even when more accurate simulation models are used to calculate the energy demand, occupant behavior...

The architecture of spaces for people on the autistic spectrum is evolving toward inclusive design, which should fit the requirements for independent, autonomous living, and proper support for relatives and caregivers. The use of smart sensor systems represents a valuable support to internal design in order to achieve independent living for impaire...

Worldwide, high plastic consumption leads to huge waste production. Macro and microplastic litter affects habitats everywhere, but especially marine environments. Unfortunately, plastic is particularly difficult to retrieve from the sea, since it tends to break up into smaller pieces due to wind, water movement and solar irradiation. Hence, its end...

In this research, a university classroom belonging to the Living Labs of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano has been adopted as a case study to analyse and discuss the potential of CO2-based controls of mechanical and air-conditioning systems in well-insulated educational environments. Exploiting air temperature and CO2 concentrations data collec...

The characterization of the dynamic behavior of building opaque elements is essential to compare different design and refurbishment alternatives. Indeed, the building envelope’s dynamic response to external weather conditions can play a key role in the building energy performance. This is true especially for cooling dominated climates but also for...

In building simulation codes, conduction transfer functions or finite difference methods are generally implemented to model the heat transmitted through the opaque components. Thermal conductivity is conventionally assumed constantly equal to its nominal value, even if it depends on both temperature and moisture content, especially for porous build...

The push towards a lower environmental impact of the building sector leads to a widespread adoption of materials like wood and natural insulation. Those materials are characterised by a solid matrix with voids that can be filled with moist air and water and in which complex heat and mass transfer occur, influencing the global thermal properties. In...

Complex Fenestration Systems CFS with different types of shading devices are widely used to enhance the building envelope’s energy efficiency and the occupants’ visual and thermal comfort. These technologies are characterized, among the others, by advanced shading systems, with for example complex geometries and highly reflective surfaces, that int...