Francesco Salamone

• PhD
• Researcher at Italian National Research Council

Thermal comfort has become a topic issue in building performance assessment as well as energy efficiency. Three methods are mainly recognized for its assessment. Two of them based on standardized methodologies, face the problem by considering the indoor environment in steady-state conditions (PMV and PPD) and users as active subjects whose thermal...

Thermal comfort is traditionally assessed by using the PMV index defined according to the EN ISO 7730:2005 where the user passively interacts with the surrounding environment considering a physic-based model built on a steady-state thermal energy balance equation. The thermal comfort satisfaction is a holistic concept comprising behavioral, physiol...

Personal Thermal Comfort models consider personal user feedback as a target value. The growing development of integrated "smart" devices following the concept of the Internet of Things and data-processing algorithms based on Machine Learning techniques allows developing promising frameworks to reach the best level of indoor thermal comfort closest...

The so-called Internet of Things (IoT), which is rapidly increasing the number of network-connected and interconnected objects, could have a far-reaching impact in identifying the link between human health, well-being, and environmental concerns. In line with the IoT concept, many commercial wearables have been introduced in recent years, which dif...

This study presents the results of the practical application of the first prototype of WEMoS, the Wearable Environmental Monitoring System, in a real case study in Singapore, along with two other wearables, a smart wristband to monitor physiological data and a smartwatch with an application (Cozie) used to acquire users’ feedback. The main objectiv...

Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) concentration is commonly used to determine indoor air quality. However, wearable environmental monitoring devices have not considered CO 2 content, because they have mainly focused on the outdoor environment. Our goal is to develop a new wearable monitoring system for indoor research purposes that also incorporates a CO 2 co...

The WHO defines threshold values of PMs. Different studies where wearables are used also to monitor PMs. With the main goal of developing a new wearable monitoring system for research purposes based on low-cost sensors and open-source hardware and considering the wide variety of low-cost sensors available on the market today, we focused on evaluati...

The literature reports several examples wherein calculation methodologies for assessing the energy performance of buildings are proposed, and solutions to improve their performance are posited, along with the introduction of advanced technologies and algorithms to reach this goal [...]

Test room experiments allow to study human-building interactions under controlled environmental boundaries. Differences in experimental design, methods, and contextual variables specific to the location and test room features, result in experimental outcomes that are difficult to generalize and compare. This paper presents an international Round Ro...

Wearable devices have been introduced for research purposes and especially for environmental monitoring, with the aim of collecting large amounts of data. In a previous study, we addressed the measurement reliability of low-cost thermohygrometers. In this study, we aim to find out how human thermal plume could affect the measurement performance of...

From March 2020, Italians experienced lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic. People had to share common living spaces with family members for an extended period converting their home into workplaces. This resulted in changes to everyday life noises with implications in terms of perception of indoor acoustic quality. An online survey was designed and di...

The article presents the outcomes of a monitoring campaign and a survey performed in a~school building in Tirana. Included in the Bilateral Agreement between the National Research Council of Italy and the Ministry of Education and Sport of the Republic of Albania, the research is based on environmental analysis, collection of data from monitoring o...

Public Authorities (PAs) need to define cross-cutting strategies for urban planning including policies for sustainable and energy-efficient buildings and innovative urban solutions. The article presents a decision support tool that combines an Urban Energy Environmental Model (UEEM) and a Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) to support the development of...

Ubiquitous computing has enabled the proliferation of low-cost solutions for capturing information about the user’s environment or biometric parameters. In this sense, the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to build new low-cost systems or verify the correspondence of low-cost systems compared to professional devices allows the spread of application pos...

The perception, physiology, behavior, and performance of building occupants are influenced by multi-domain exposures: the simultaneous presence of multiple environmental stimuli, i.e., visual, thermal, acoustic, and air quality. Despite being extensive, the literature on multi-domain exposures presents heterogeneous methodological approaches and in...

A thermohygrometer is an instrument that is able to measure relative humidity and air temperature, which are two of the fundamental parameters to estimate human thermal comfort. To date, the market offers small and low-cost solutions for this instrument, providing the opportunity to bring electronics closer to the end-user and contributing to the p...

In the last decade, innovative systems such as Artificial Skylights (AS) have been developed to reproduce the blue-sky effect and white sunlight, giving the impression that interiors are illuminated by natural light, even when this is not available because of construction- or climate-related reasons. Given the hybrid characteristics between natural...

Italians were the first European citizens to experience the lockdown due to Sars-Cov-2 in March 2020. Most employees were forced to work from home. People suddenly had to share common living spaces with family members for longer periods of time and convert home spaces into workplaces. This inevitably had a subjective impact on the perception, satis...

The achievement of a good visual environment is key to guaranteeing human satisfaction indoors. In this context, it is crucial to assess the visual environment through the measurement of human perception. However, the assessment of the visual environment through human perception is often complicated. Using real spaces or mock-ups is time consuming,...

Wearables are mainly used for commercial purposes to enhance smartphone functionality by enabling payment for commercial items or monitoring physical activity. As emerged from a recent systematic review, many research studies focused on using wearable devices for environmental monitoring of the built environment. Those studies showed that, among th...

Italy was the first country in Europe to enter lock-down due to COVID-19 pandemic. Most employees have been forced to adopt a work at home solution to avoid any possibility of spreading the virus. The article presents the results of a survey carried out in March-June 2020, during the first lockdown in Italy, aimed at investigating how people percei...

Since its introduction in 2010, the nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB) concept has known a large diffusion in European countries. Albania, an aspiring candidate country to join the European Union EU, is paving the way towards its introduction by transposing EU directives in the fields of energy efficiency into the national legislation. Most of the...

The article describes the outcomes of the monitoring campaign carried out in an educational building nearby Tirana, capital of Albania. Performed under the bilateral agreement between the National Research Council of Italy and the Ministry of Education and Sport of the Republic of Albania, the study proposes a combined approach for the assessment o...

Personal Thermal Comfort models differ from the steady-state methods because they consider personal user feedback as target value. Today, the availability of integrated "smart" devices following the concept of the Internet of Things and Machine Learning (ML) techniques allows developing frameworks reaching optimized indoor thermal comfort condition...

The Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) is a basic requirement for the design of energy-efficient buildings since it affects the occupants’ well-being and health inside buildings. Over the years, the issue of IEQ has been widely investigated under different perspectives: from the first experiments aimed at assessing the physiological response of ind...

Modelling of the behaviour of the complex flows that characterize the urban fabric is a hot topic for the definition of future sustainable policies. The article presents a method based on a synergic and integrated bottom-up approach for both energy efficiency and seismic analysis for the refurbishment of buildings at urban scale. The method can be...

Users’ satisfaction in indoor spaces plays a key role in building design. In recent years, scientific research has focused more and more on the effects produced by the presence of greenery solutions in indoor environments. In this study, the Internet of Things (IoT) concept is used to define an effective solution to monitor indoor environmental par...

The quality of the indoor environment, in terms of thermal, lighting, air and acoustic quality, grouped in the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) concept, plays a key role in occupants’ wellbeing and satisfaction. Only in recent years IEQ has been investigated as a whole. Today, IEQ occupies the same place of energy efficiency in the design of buil...

The new vision of Smart Cities drives policies regarding sustainability of urban environment in terms of reducing consumption, environmental impacts and improving energy efficiency and safety of building sector. The mutual interaction between buildings and the surrounding built environment can affect all these fields. In particular, the paper inves...

The scientific community, along with the worldwide governments, debate about the performances of buildings for decades and today the subject is still of topical interest. The recent regulatory framework requires increasingly high energy-efficient buildings in order to reduce the overall impact of building sector and to improve the user’s well-being...

Energy efficiency of buildings is a critical issue for international and national policy. The European Directives provide strict requirements for buildings, imposing the near Zero Energy Building (nZEB) standard for new or refurbished public and private buildings starting from 2018 and 2020, respectively. Furthermore, Zero Energy Building (ZEB) is...

The enhancement of energy performance of buildings has become a pillar of energy policies. The main target is the cut of energy consumption to reduce buildings footprint. This aim is pursued by introducing constrains on building requirements in terms of properties of basic materials and components and exploitation of renewable energy sources. That...

Building sector is responsible for approximately 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in the EU. For more than a decade the Energy Performance Certification (EPC) revealed to be an effective tool to create demand for energy efficiency in buildings providing recommendations for the cost-effective upgrading of the energy performance. Th...

The urban regeneration actions arise by the growing importance of information and communication technologies, moving to sustainable solutions, energy saving and security. New energy planning tools are adopted suggesting the legislator towards large-scale energy policies, by setting up all the information related to the building fabric whose represe...

Building sector is responsible for approximately 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in the EU. For more than a decade the Energy Performance Certification (EPC) revealed to be an effective tool to create demand for energy efficiency in buildings providing recommendations for the cost-effective upgrading of the energy performance. Th...

The urban regeneration actions arise by the growing importance of information and communication technologies, moving to sustainable solutions, energy saving and security. New energy planning tools are adopted suggesting the legislator towards large-scale energy policies, by setting up all the information related to the building fabric whose represe...

Durability is an important aspect that has not to be neglected in ZEB design. The requirements for buildings energy needs reduction and increase of renewable energy sources stimulated designers to integrate technologies in an efficient way. This ambitious goal must meet the capacity of the technical solutions to guarantee their performances over th...

The article describes the design and the application stage of a smart energy audit system, integrated within building, and the methodologies adopted for the detection of malfunctions of the plant. The system is set up as a "black box" consisting of a hardware aimed at logging both energy and environmental parameters and a software for the assessmen...

The article describes the results of the “Open-source Smart lamp” aimed at designing and developing a smart appliance that integrates a wireless communication system for building automation, following the maker movement philosophy. The device is able to get an overview of the potential of a nearable device equipped with a variety of sensors to broa...

The hygro-thermal comfort (ICQ) is defined as the psychophysical state in which the subject expresses a condition of well-being with respect to environmental variables, a condition known as thermal neutrality. Furthermore, the ICQ represents one pillar of the holistic concept of the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ). The methods for the assessment...

The “Smart” concept applied to the cities intends to improve different fields of the urban context and in particular the life quality of citizens. An important part of the overall well-being is the urban comfort, defined as a function of some environmental parameters. The knowledge and the widespread collection of the geospatial information allow t...

Cities play a key role in sustainability policies aimed at reducing environmental impacts and increasing energy efficiency in the building sector. At urban level, the analysis models are split in bottom-up and top-down types as a function of the methodological approach of input data processing, aggregated in the first case and disaggregated in the...

The article describes the results of the project “open source smart lamp” aimed at designing and developing a smart object able to manage and control the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of the built environment. A first version of this smart object, built following a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach using a microcontroller, an integrated temperatur...

nEMoS (nano Environmental Monitoring System) is a 3D-printed device built following the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach. It can be connected to the web and it can be used to assess indoor environmental quality (IEQ). It is built using some low-cost sensors connected to an Arduino microcontroller board. The device is assembled in a small-sized case an...

The nEMoS (nano Environmental Monitoring System ) device is an all-in-one, low-cost, web-connected and 3D-printed device aimed at assessing the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) of buildings. It is built using some low-cost sensors connected to an Arduino microcontroller board. The device is assembled in a small size case and the integrated air te...

The article describes the result of the open source Smart lamp project. The first version of this “smart” object, built following a DIY approach using a microcontroller, an integrated temperature and relative humidity sensor and techniques of Additive Manufacturing, allowed to adjust the Indoor Climate Quality (ICQ), by interacting directly with th...

The article describes an accurate and suitable simplified tool aimed at evaluating, controlling and managing heat energy fluxes in buildings. The focus is the development of a Resistance-Capacitance (RC) thermal model able to represent the envelope thermal inertia on an hourly time basis. The single RC module simulates the thermal response of a sin...

The article describes the application of an object, called Smart lamp, for the control of the thermal comfort in real working conditions, implemented following the Do IT Yourself (DIY) approach, using a microcontroller, low cost sensors and a 3D printer. The idea beyond the Smart lamp is the concept of smart environments in which sensors and actuat...

The paper describes an hourly simplified model for the evaluation of the energy performance of heat pumps in cooling mode maintaining a high accuracy and low computational cost. This approach differs from the methods used for the assessment of the overall energy consumption of the building, normally placed in the so-called white or black box models...

The article describes the design phase, development and practical application of a smart object integrated in a desk lamp and called “Smart Lamp”, useful to optimize the indoor thermal comfort and energy savings that are two important workplace issues where the comfort of the workers and the consumption of the building strongly affect the economic...

The aim of the article is to describe the results of an experimental campaign based on the assessment of a heat recovery unit coupled with a dynamic window. Two fully monitored and calibrated outdoor test cells are used, in order to evaluate the energy performance and the related thermal comfort. The former presents a traditional window with double...

The article describes the design phase, development and practical application of a low-cost control system for a forced circulation solar plant in an outdoor test cell located near Milan. Such a system provides for the use of an electric pump for the circulation of heat transfer fluid connecting the solar thermal panel to the storage tank. The runn...

The Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) refers to the quality of the environment in relation to the health and well-being of the occupants. It is a holistic concept, which considers several categories, each related to a specific environmental parameter. This article describes a low-cost and open-source hardware architecture able to detect the indoor...

The problem of factory sustainability is commonly addressed by focusing on specific aspects related to products, processes or production resources, while the impact of the building and facilities is usually neglected even though it counts for 40% of the total world’s energy consumption. This paper presents a holistic framework based on an integrate...

Energy efficiency and reduction of building consumption are deeply felt issues both at Italian and international level. The recent regulatory framework sets stringent limits on energy performance of buildings. Awaiting the adoption of these principles, several methods have been developed to solve the problem of energy consumption of buildings, amon...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the performance of thermal transmittance of a dynamic glazing system in the real conditions of work. The thermal transmittance of an envelope component, opaque or transparent, is not a constant physical quantity but it depends on the different intrinsic characteristics of the constituent materials. The thermal tr...

The Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) refers to the quality of the environment inrelation to health and well-being of the occupants. The IEQ is a holistic concept, which considers several categories, each related to a specific environmental parameter. This paper describes the low-cost and open-source hardware architecture alternative to traditiona...

The world's energy consumption has doubled over the past 40 years and it is estimated that one-third comes from industry. Therefore, an increase of the efficiency in energy use in industries would greatly benefit the sustainability of the factories and consequently of the whole environment and society. A factory is a complex entity constituted by p...

The world's energy consumption has doubled over the past 40 years and it is estimated that one-third comes from industry. Therefore, an increase of the efficiency in energy use in industries would greatly benefit the sustainability of the factories and consequently of the whole environment and society. A factory is a complex entity constituted by p...

Energy consumption of buildings has grown in parallel with the improvement of the lifestyle of the occupants. This growth in consumption of housing affects the environmental and ecological conditions. Today, the main challenge is to increase the awareness of users, by maintaining elevated lifestyle, on the one hand, and educing consumptions so as t...