Vincenzo Corrado

Polytechnic University of Turin | polito · DENERG - Department of Energy

The impacts of climate change, excessive greenhouse gas emissions, and the current energy crisis have motivated the European Union to adopt mitigation and adaptation strategies. These strategies primarily focus on the building sector due to its crucial role in addressing these issues. Among the strategies, the implementation of resilient technologi...

We present unprecedented datasets of current and future projected weather files for building simulations in 15 major cities distributed across 10 climate zones worldwide. The datasets include ambient air temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, direct and diffuse solar irradiance, and wind speed at hourly resolution, which are essentia...

We present unprecedented datasets of current and future projected weather files for building simulations in 15 major cities distributed across 10 climate zones worldwide. The datasets include ambient air temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, direct and diffuse solar irradiance, and wind speed at hourly resolution, which are essentia...

The revision of the Energy Performance of Building Directive (EPBD) provides for the construction of zero-emission buildings. The present work investigates possible solutions aimed at phasing out fossil fuel systems in buildings, in accordance with the EPBD requirements. An insulated residential building located in Rome is presented. The proposed r...

An important research issue in assessing the energy performance of buildings concerns the modelling of the interaction between the built environment and the heating/cooling emission systems. Several methods can be used to evaluate the effect of the heating emitter characteristics, including the possible embedment in the building structure, non-unif...

Within Annex 80, there is a manifold need to use key performance indicators (KPI, i.e. performance met rics). This is relevant to all Subtasks. The “Task Group KPI” is established to coordinate and clarify the KPIs, used within Annex 80. The Task Group shall collect and coordinate KPIs, relevant to Resilient Cool ing. It shall develop and constantl...

The world is facing a rapid increase of air conditioning of buildings. It is the motivation of Annex 80 to develop, assess and communicate solutions of resilient cooling and overheating protection. Resilient Cooling is used to denote low energy and low carbon cooling solutions that strengthen the ability of individuals and our community to withstan...

International Energy Agency Energy in Buildings and Communities (IEA EBC) Annex 80: Resilient Cooling of Buildings promotes a rapid transition to the mainstream and preferred use of resilient low-energy and low-carbon cooling systems in buildings. Annex 80 Subtask D (Policy Actions) advances policy-related endeavors that support energy efficiency a...

Calibration of the existing building simulation model is key to correctly evaluating the energy savings that are achievable through retrofit. However, calibration is a non-standard phase where different approaches can possibly lead to different models. In this study, an existing residential building is simulated in parallel by four research groups...

In the last years, new technical standards for the assessment of the energy efficiency of technical building systems were developed by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). These procedures were conceived as to combine the easiness of the calculation methodologies and their related assumptions with a sufficient level of accuracy. While...

The Italian National Annex (NA) to EN ISO 52016-1 is aimed at improving the simplified hourly calculation method of the building thermal performance assessment by introducing different modelling options. The present work deepens the influence of the Italian NA improved method on the thermal energy needs for heating and cooling of a residential buil...

In the last years, international technical standards have introduced several procedures for modelling the heat generation sub-system, both providing new calculation methods and updating the old ones. A still open issue concerns the modelling of these sub-systems, by adapting the standard procedure – usually founded on simplified assumptions – to th...

The issue of improving the building energy efficiency led to the development of calculation methods for the building energy performance assessment. To overcome the low accessibility to detailed input data, the recently introduced EN ISO 52016-1 hourly method is based on assumptions and simplifications chosen to allow a sufficient accuracy in the ou...

The recently issued EN ISO 52016-1 technical standard provides a new simplified dynamic method for the building energy performance assessment. Since an extensive validation of the EN ISO 52016-1 hourly method is still missing, the present work investigates the effect of the main modelling assumptions—related to the heat balance on the outdoor and t...

The compliance with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) requirements should be considered when designing retrofit actions for the refurbishment of existing buildings. The research is aimed to reduce the imbalance between the visual and thermal domains through the improvement of different design parameters in compliance with the nearly zero-energ...

There is growing concern that global warming will change the building’s performance pattern in the future. This paper investigates the effects of climate changes on the heating and cooling energy demand, the overall energy performance and the overheating risk of typical residential buildings (existing and refurbished) in the biggest city of the mos...

The building energy performance pattern is predicted to be shifted in the future due to climate change. To analyze this phenomenon, there is an urgent need for reliable and robust future weather datasets. Several ways for estimating future climate projection and creating weather files exist. This paper attempts to comparatively analyze three tools...

As part of the EBC Annex 80 - Resilient cooling of buildings activities, the Thermal Condition Taskforce was created, in April 2020. In coordination with all other groups and the Weather Data Taskforce, two objectives were set by the Annex leader Dr. Peter Holzer. Firstly, to define common thermal conditions to assess different cooling technologies...

The EN ISO 52016-1 standard presents a new simplified dynamic calculation procedure, whose aim is to provide an accurate energy performance assessment without excessively increasing the number of data required. The Italian National Annex to EN ISO 52016-1, currently under development, provides some improvements to the hourly calculation method; des...

The research investigates the validity of the simple hourly method, as introduced by the EN ISO 52016-1 standard, for the assessment of the building energy demand for heating and cooling, by comparing it with a detailed dynamic model (EnergyPlus). A new methodology is provided to identify and quantify the causes of deviations between the models. It...

The EU Member States are being involved to develop long-term strategies and to promote investments aimed at improving the energy efficiency of the building stock, at increasing the use of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and at growing the number of Nearly Zero-Energy Buildings (NZEBs). The aim of this article is to investigate energy and economic im...

Heat and moisture (HM) transfer simulations of building envelopes and whole building energy simulations require adequate weather files. The common approach is to use weather data of reference years constructed from meteorological records. The weather record affects the capability of representing the real weather of the resulting reference years. In...

The EN ISO 52016-1:2018 technical standard has introduced a new simplified dynamic method for the calculation of the building energy need for heating and cooling. This new procedure combines a low amount of input data required, as for the previous quasi-steady and dynamic simplified methods of the withdrawn EN ISO 13790 standard, with an increased...

In building performance simulation, fixed input assumptions lead to fixed computed values for building performance indicators. This has been suggested to be misleading, as it does not express the uncertainty of simulation-based performance predictions. A counterargument to this position suggests that the empirical basis for the determination of the...

Improvement of safety and eco-efficiency of existing buildings is an interdisciplinary problem: this is an established, although recent, research and policy acquisition. The age profile analysis of the EU's building heritage reveals that the main part of this 27 billion m2 stock was built between 1961 and 1990, and a significant percentage before 1...

Dynamic energy simulation is increasingly used to design retrofit interventions in existing buildings. Energy savings are correctly predicted if the simulation model is carefully calibrated against measured data. In this study the same building storey is simulated by four different research groups with different dynamic simulation tools (EnergyPlus...

Heat, air and moisture (HAM) transfer simulations used in moisture accumulation risk assessment of building envelopes require adequate weather files. The common approach is to use weather data of reference years constructed from meteorological records. The length of the records affects the capability of representing the real weather of the resultin...

Directive 2010/31/EU promotes the refurbishment of existing buildings to change them into nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEBs). Within this framework, it is of crucial importance to guarantee the best trade-off between energy performance and indoor environmental quality (IEQ). The implications of a global refurbishment scenario on thermal and visua...

As of 2021 all new buildings within the European Union will be nearly Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB). Different plans are being promoted by member states to reach this goal, to increase the number of NZEBs and to facilitate the retrofit of existing constructions. Within this frame, several analyses of cost benefits have been developed to evaluate...

Interstitial condensation and water accumulation risk in building envelopes could be assessed with methods and models based on moisture migration through porous media coupled to heat transfer. One of the difficulties in evaluating the boundary conditions for the heat and mass transfer model is the choice of an appropriate weather file. The most adv...

The reliability and representativeness of climatic data play a fundamental role in the assessment of building energy performance. Most widely used calculation tools make use of Typical Meteorological Years (TMYs), which can be used for several applications, such as the design or verification of energy performance of buildings, and the rating of tec...

In the last decades, European countries have provided for stringent energy requirements for new buildings. In improving the energy performance of buildings, windows play a significant role as they largely influence the energy need. The windows design should base on the balanced trade-off between the solar heat gains and the heat transfer by transmi...

The recent European energy policies progressively introduced more restrictive energy performance (EP) requirements aimed at achieving the nearly zero-energy building target for all new buildings and major renovations. To check compliance with these requirements, the building energy performance can be evaluated through different calculation methods,...

The 1st International Conference on Buildings, Energy, Systems, and Technology (BEST 2016), was held in Belgrade, Serbia, on November 2-4,2016. This conference was an opportunity to bring together experts with different skills around the theme of building performance. It covered different aspects (technology, energy, environment, and economy), dif...

Increase thermal comfort is considered as one of the main benefits of a deep renovation right after energy saving. However, an increase in thermal comfort could be seen as a behavioural change caused by the energy efficiency improvement that reduces expected energy saving: the so-called rebound effect. This paper shows how building energy need is c...

The article presents the fundamental steps of building refurbishment toward the nZEB target; it is based on a detailed energy audit and on a financial analysis. The methodology starts from the set-up of a numerical model of the building, calibrated through actual data on operation, climate and energy consumption. Then, a cost-optimisation procedure...

A cross-country comparison of the RePublic_ZEB project results is presented. The paper reports on the energy efficiency measures and on the options considered for the refurbishment of the public buildings taken as representative of the building stock in the countries involved in the project. The nZEB solutions are compared in terms of adopted energ...

Building energy performance requirements aiming at the nZEB target have been recently established by the national legislation. In Italy, the requirements are verified through the notional reference building, whose U-values are reduced in two steps: up to 2018 and since 2019 for public buildings, and up to 2020 and since 2021 for all other buildings...

The building energy performance requirements in the regulations are usually expressed by means of a fixed value or a variable value defined through a formula or the notional reference building approach. The aim of the article is to enhance the application of the notional reference building approach in the energy performance legislation. To this pur...

The term rebound effect is commonly used in literature to identify the gap between the estimated and the real energy savings due to changes in the occupant behaviour after a building energy retrofit. In the present article, the rebound effect for some Italian residential building types is investigated through dynamic simulation. The energy efficien...

In the last few years, the collecting and processing of occupancy data have become emerging issues since they can affect, either directly or indirectly, several energy operations in buildings. The application of data analytics-based methods makes it possible to exploit the potentialities of occupancy related knowledge to enhance the energy manageme...

The refurbishment of the existing building stocks represents a great potential for energy savings. To make the refurbishment effective, proper modeling of the current energy performance is needed. In most European countries, few and low quality data on the energy performance and on the refurbishment of building stocks are revealed, which increases...

The European residential building stock is largely composed of buildings with poor energy performance, therefore basic retrofit actions could lead to significant energy savings. However, energy refurbishment measures should be identified in accurate way, taking into account the technical viability and aiming both to increase the building energy per...

The study presents some results of the on-going European Project, RePublic_ZEB, on the refurbishment of the public building stock towards nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB). The work is focused on the application of the nZEB requirements to two existing public buildings representative of the 1960s in Northern Italy. Many packages of energy efficien...

Reference climatic data have been available since the early 90s in order to ensure uniformity of assessment and repeatability of energy performance calculations: they include monthly means of meteorological elements, as reported in national standards. Other climatic data were provided by ENEA for the period 1995-1999. More recently, new test refere...

Directive 2010/31/EU requires since 2019 the new public buildings and since 2021 all the new buildings to be nearly zero-energy (nZEB). In Italy, as in many geographical contexts, the existing buildings represent the majority of the building stock and equally the largest and most cost-effective energy saving potential. This study presents the energ...

The Italian Ministerial Decree 26/06/2015 specifies the requirements of nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEBs) and demands that the energy performance of the new building is compared with that of a reference or target building, which has the same location, function, size, but reference insulation level and technical systems efficiencies.

The growing attention towards the optimization of the overall performance of a building, in terms of both indoor environmental quality and energy consumption, has brought about the need to carry out analyses, which consider the interactions of all affecting parameters. In particular, thermal and daylighting analysis should be carried out in synergy...

The article illustrates the Italian pilot action in the IEE-EPISCOPE project, focussing on the analysis of energy refurbishment trends of the Piedmont region residential building stock.The methodology follows three steps: (1) definition of a knowledge-base on the current state of the building stock, (2) investigation of refurbishment scenarios cons...

As reported in the scientific literature and mentioned in building energy performance legislation, the thermal inertia of the opaque building envelope can have a significant positive impact on the reduction of summer indoor overheating, of space cooling peak load and of electricity consumption.At the early stages of the envelope design, there is a...