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Publications (68)
Since people tend to spend more and more time visiting museums, more accurate requirements are needed for the indoor environmental conditions of these confined spaces where two primary requisites coincide in defining their optimal indoor microclimate: the need for the appropriate artwork preservation and suitable levels of indoor comfort conditions...
The study of user behavior and mobility choices is a crucial aspect in the design of innovative transportation services that genuinely cater to people's needs, placing the user and their senses at the core, developing services that address not only the needs but also the sensemaking of individuals (Pennington, 2016). To achieve this goal, the desig...
Purpose
Decarbonizing cities is one of today’s biggest challenges. In this regard, particular attention has been paid on improving the environmental performance of buildings. In this framework, this work consists in assessing the environmental impact of an innovative building envelope component derived from urban agriculture (UA) wastes. In fact, r...
Green roofs are increasingly being used in urban settings because of the many benefits they are capable of providing. Because of their widespread use, the issue of how to conduct proper disposal of green roofs once they have reached their end of life is beginning to be raised. The present study is a review of the scientific literature published bet...
The management of municipal solid waste is a crucial issue to address as we move toward the decarbonization of urban contexts. Not by chance, this sector plays a relevant role in the Covenant of Mayors program, whereby municipalities are called to design their own Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SECAPs). However, despite new regulations strongly p...
Nowadays, energy efficiency and sustainability are the fulcra of building policies. These policies promote the use of new technologies and materials that can reduce the primary energy involved and the environmental costs of construction, guarantying at the same time a high level of comfort for the building’s occupants. Synergy between previous cons...
Governments are required to take proper measures to promote the use of electric and hybrid vehicles and, more generally, to push people towards sweeter modalities including walking and biking. To reach such tight and challenging goals, local institutions should be deeply involved, and universities among them. The promotion of sustainable mobility p...
Microclimate for cultural heritage plays a fundamental role in the degradation process of artefacts exhibited in museums. Generally, the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) monitoring inside museums is based on conventional measurements of thermo-hygrometry parameters and longtime averaged measurements of atmospheric pollutants’ concentration. Unfortunately,...
In this work, polyurethane (PU) insulating panels containing different amounts of a microencapsulated paraffin with a nominal melting temperature of 24 °C, used as phase change material (PCM), were produced. The resulting panels behaved as multifunctional materials able to thermally insulate and simultaneously storing/releasing thermal energy near...
Tourism represents an important economic driver in Italy, being responsible for approximately 13.2% of the total GDP (a value higher than the reference European average) and for nearly 10% of the regional GDP. Among the touristic sectors, the agritourist ones show a persistent growth, experiencing in 2019 a 6.7 point percentage improvement compared...
p>Coconut fibre insulators, represent an insulating material considered as 'exotic', which clashes with the doubts of his thermo-hygrometric behavior, in particular, in the case of covering technology such as green roofs, a technological solution adopted in the case of sustainable buildings or nearly zero energy building. Green roofs represent a va...
In the line of pursuing better energy efficiency in human activities that would result in a more sustainable utilization of resources, the building sector plays a relevant role, being responsible for almost 40% of both energy consumption and the release of pollutant substances in the atmosphere. For this purpose, techniques aimed at improving the e...
The United Nations as well as the European Union are strongly committed in promoting a transition towards more sustainable and resilient cities. Indeed, they are increasingly affected by different types of threats, among which the natural ones such as earthquakes, fires, and floods (shocks) and climate variability (stresses). Cities are quite often...
The energy efficiency interventions and rehabilitation actions regarding university campuses are characterized by an emblematic impact, representing significant examples of good practices that a given community could adopt, even at the city level.
Starting from the idea that campuses may be regarded as small scale models of cities, a quantitative m...
Usually, mobility policies assessed by local institutions tend to intervene on the side of the urban transport networks, by designing new and expensive infrastructures, whereas only a few attention is paid to the possible positive effects induced by proper mobility behaviors of people. On purpose, Smartphone technologies and platforms are rapidly b...
Municipal solid waste (MSW) management constitutes a highly challenging issue to cope with in order of moving towards more sustainable urban policies. Despite new Standards call for recycling and reusing materials contained in the urban waste, several municipalities still use landfilling as a waste disposal method. Other than the environmental pres...
Only recently, the use of wooden buildings is spreading in the central and southern parts of the Italy due to national and EU policies on eco-sustainability and energy saving. Knowledge of the durability of the building envelope elements, generally made with dry assembled stratified systems, is still insufficient. The paper presents the first resul...
Recent years have seen an increasing public interest in issues related to energy saving and environmental pollution reduction in the building sector. As a result, many directives have been issued, the most important being the Directive 2010/31/EU (EPBD Recast) on the energy performance of buildings, which requires that "Member States shall ensure t...
Several studies analyze the thermal performance of vegetated roofs, presenting either mathematical models or experimental quantifications of heat transfer process through them, also showing the effect of vegetation and soil parameters on the thermal and energy performance of this type of roofing system. However, presently the level of availability...
The paper provides a contribution for populating database of three physical parameters needed to model energy performance of buildings with green roofs: “coverage ratio” (σf), leaf area index (LAI) and leaf temperature (Tf). On purpose, six plant species were investigated experimentally: Phyla nordiflora, Aptenia lancifolia, Mesembryanthenum barbat...
In this paper, a dynamic simulation of a building located in the Campus University of Palermo, Italy, has been carried out. We considered two different scenarios; in the first one, the building as it is, with a conventional covering, while in the second one the roof was equipped with a green roof. The results of the two simulations have been compar...
A simplified version of the ecological footprint method is proposed for assessing the environmental performances of urban transportation systems. The method, starting from the knowledge of the composition of the running vehicular fleet, is here applied to a southern Italian province. It represents a synthetic indicator of the environmental pressure...
Transportation is a crucial sector, to be suitably approached in order of getting human activities in more environmentally sustainable paths. In fact, in developing, as well in less developing, countries people and freights mobility are responsible of important amount of pollutant emissions and are cause of significant levels of energy consumptions...
Today the utilization of renewable energy sources is very important to support the traditional ones, and also in order to reach the objectives fixed by the Kyoto Protocol.
In this context, also well-known technologies related to the electric energy production, formerly not suitable – due to the poor technological level of the components or due to t...
Energy efficiency in buildings is one of the main strategies to reduce environmental impact of the building sector. This goal can be obtained not only reducing energy demand for heating and cooling, but also, for example, improving envelope performances. On the other hand, the new approaches to energy efficient design are not only moving in the dir...
The improvement of the energy efficiency of buildings calls for the availability of tools for evaluating and simulating the thermal behaviour of buildings, needing as input climatic databases. These databases contain a very large amount of data, resulting in long computational time analysis. Therefore, simple aggregation methods are used, among whi...
The necessity to reduce greenhouse gases emission produced by energy building consumptions and to cut the energy bill (mainly due to the use of fossil sources) leads to the employment of renewable energy sources in new planned scenarios. In particular, more and more often municipal energy and environmental plans pay great attention to the possibili...
The Eco-label scheme is becoming ever more important in the environmental certification of products and services, especially in light of the recent ambitious aim of containing greenhouse emissions and improving the efficiency of utilizing energy sources. A recently introduced hypothesis concerns the European Eco-label scheme relating to buildings,...
This paper will examine three methodologies deployed in off-line research relating to air quality in museums. These methodologies made use of sensors based on the different chemical-physicalproperties of various materials (corrosiveness, hardness and absorption). Various field applications were applied to case studies, which were performed in two m...
The rapid improvement in the standard of living requires more detailed and sophisticated methods of evaluating comfort conditions. But, maintaining thermal comfort conditions in confined environments may require complex regulation procedures and the proper management of heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. In turn, the requirem...
Through the paper the characterization of a comfort model, enriching that proposed by Fanger with an adaptive approach, is carried out using a Multi Agent System (MAS). This is a well suited coordinated set of Intelligent Agents, that are software applications interacting in order to follow user in his own needs and preferences in relation to indoo...
The energy demand of the hotel sector of an Italian region is here utilized for hierarchizing, by means of an empirical method, efficient measures devoted to energy saving and reduction of CO2 emissions.Due to the large number of consumers present in the selected territorial area and the lack in detailed data, the energy demand assessment is here c...
In museums, environmental indoor conditions should, contemporaneously, preserve the exhibited works of art and ensure the comfort conditions for people. Unfortunately, human and artworks requirements are characterised by different values of the physical indoor parameters that, occasionally, could become conflicting. In the paper, these problems are...
This paper addresses an important problem in the evaluation of the thermal comfort of people living or working in the sort of confined spaces typical of current architecture. In the details, a new algorithm is proposed for the evaluation of the angle factors of people within rooms characterized by complex shapes, where the envelope components are n...
One of the most important components affecting the human thermal balance is represented by its radiative exchange with the surrounding surfaces. The projected area of the human body is an important parameter of these thermal exchanges. Unfortunately, although the anthropometric measures of people are characterized by significant differences among v...
Thermal indoor microclimate conditions in museum buildings refer to two important requirements: the preservation of works of art and the comfort of visitors to these buildings and/or those working inside them. Unfortunately, different works of art have different internal parameters which render the management and control of the indoor thermal micro...
Thermal comfort of people working or living in confined spaces depends, to a large extent, on the radiative thermal exchanges. These contributions are expressed, among other things, as a function of the mean radiant temperature that, in the general cases where there is a presence of high intensity sources, must be expressed as a function of the ang...
Thermal comfort of people occupying indoor spaces depends, to a large extent, on the direct component of solar radiation incident on the human body. In turn, even the diffuse component of the solar radiation could affect the thermal sensations of people. Despite this evidence, at the present there is a lack in the availability of simple and reliabl...
The work addresses one of the most important problems in contemporary environmental land planning. Already
existing procedures, in fact, must now conform to the new requirements imposed by the recent national and
international regulations and standards that call for a more conscious approach to the use of natural resources.
Strategic Environmental...
This paper describes some results from an experiment carried out regarding a procedure to be adopted for temperature and R.H. monitoring of indoor spaces designed for exhibiting events, such as museums and similar institutions. The monitored data employed in this study has been collected by the Department di Ricerche Energetiche ed Ambientali of th...
The thermal sensation experienced by a subject in a confined environment is significantly affected by the radiative heat exchange between the human body and the surrounding surfaces: it contributes as far as 30% of the whole thermal exchanges of the subject.Besides, the presence of high-intensity radiation sources like, for example, the sun, may ap...
The evaluation of comfort conditions of people in confined environments requires a knowledge of the human body’s radiation data. This is essentially represented by the projected area of the body in a given direction. From this factor, other important parameters can be computed, such as projected area factors and angle factors. Presently, these para...
Within the assessment of the sustainability of plans and actions concerning the built environment, the transportation sector plays an increasing role, due to its importance in the economic and social life of countries. As that, the analysis of the sustainability concerning the transportation sector is now often embodied into the so called Strategic...
The control and the monitoring of indoor thermal conditions represents a pre-eminent task with the aim of ensuring suitable working and living spaces to people. Especially in industrialised countries, in fact, several rules and standards have been recently released in order of providing technicians with suitable design tools and effective indexes a...
Man in developed countries is looking for new and more suitable paradigms of a correct evolution, founded on an improved level of quality of life, on a pollution-free environment and on the availability of rising amount of time to be spent in pleasure and cultural activities.
The improvement of the energy efficiency of buildings calls for the availability of tools for evaluating and simulating the thermal behaviour of buildings. These simulation tools generally need a complete input data set concerning the climatic conditions at a given location. In the most cases, this huge mass of data is very complex, so simple aggre...
Sommario Nel presente lavoro viene descritta una evoluzione della metodologia COPERT III per la stima delle emissioni inquinanti rilasciate dai sistemi di trasporto. Il metodo, a partire da un numero relativamente basso di dati di input, consente di prevedere le emissioni inquinanti rilasciate in atmosfera da differenti scenari di trasporto a livel...
