• Energy Research

The management of a large number of students, activities and services is one of the biggest challenges for modern campuses. A good solution to face these issues is the application of the Smart concept to university campuses, creating the new idea of Smart Campus. This idea is based on the deep knowledge of the area and the consequent choice of suitable actions and strategies. The proposed approach develops two aspects: the recognition of the mutual influences among the Smart fields; the prioritization process weighted on several factors, such as production times, integration degree, feasibility, stakeholders' opinion, etc. The aim of this paper is to define a methodology for the conscious and coherent choice of strategies to develop the Smart Campus, evaluating them on the basis of the level of integration, feasibility and obtained benefits.

Abstract Climatic conditions strongly affect the energy performance of buildings, and due to the synergy between global climate change and the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, the climatic conditions inside and outside the city are highly different. However, weather data collected at airports are commonly used for building energy simulations and these data do not take into account real temperature distribution in cities. Many studies in the literature address the topic but mostly considering only a couple of urban and non-urban stations. In this paper, the urban climate in Rome, Italy, is analysed after monitoring of the air temperature and relative humidity in four selected neighbourhoods and one reference station from October 2014 until September 2017. Rome is characterised by a composite urban pattern and high variability of building types, of which the four selected areas are representative. The heating degree days decrease up to 18% and cooling degree days increase up to 157% in the urban area with respect to the rural reference and the area most affected by the UHI is the city centre. The UHI is more intense in summer than in winter (average increase between 0.7 °C and 1 °C); while the diurnal and nocturnal UHI depends on the season and the neighbourhood. Then, the energy performance of a representative apartment block and a typical office building was computed using the measured data. Regarding the predicted energy performance, comparing the four urban sites and the reference site, the UHI causes a reduction of heating consumption up to 21% in residential building and 18% in the office building. An increase of cooling consumption up to 74% is instead computed for the residential building and up to 53% for the office building.

The growing sensibility on energy consumption has focused people interest in energy optimization technologies. Non-intrusive load monitoring system (NILMS) are a cheap solution that require minimal equipment and installation time. The aim of the research is to develop a load analyzing platform for electrical devices to obtain information on their functionality and to display the costumer advantage to change their energy class. It monitors malfunctions or non-critical failures in real-time. It also counts the device operative life-time. The architecture is made of a local analysis electrical plug, which get the load information, and a central unit which elaborates data. The hardware implements a hall-effect ammeter, a power transformer and a micro controller (AT-mega328). The central unit is a small integrated computer (Raspberry). The communication between the devices utilize a low-range radio transmitter.

Green building concept plays a fundamental role in reducing the use of resources and the impacts on human health and environment, during the whole building life cycle. Therefore, a method to measure the building sustainability rate is crucial for comparing various alternatives in terms of use of different materials, energy resources, production processes to reduce energy consumption and environmental impacts. Many protocols have been proposed to perform buildings’ sustainability evaluation; however, different operators applying these certification tools might need to make hypotheses, even different from each other, to complete the whole procedure. Hence, this work aims to evaluate whether and how the hypotheses formulated by each operator can influence the final certification level. To this end, a Round Robin Test among international partners was performed using different versions of LEED sustainability protocol to the same building with the same boundary conditions, comparing and analyzing the results provided by the participants. The final aim was to identify which issues have more influence on the final performance rate, giving to the users a deeper knowledge of the aspects included in these procedures. The results showed the potential of these building environmental certification systems, capable of offering a transversal level of environmental sustainability.

Light-emitting diodes (LED) are a promising light source for the cultivation of edible vegetables in greenhouses. The spectral radiation of the light sources has an impact on plants physiological parameters, as well as on morphological features. In this study the growth of spinach plants has been carried out in experimental boxes under two white LED treatments having different correlate color temperature (CCT): the cold lighting (CL) corresponded to 6500 K, while the warm lighting (WL) to 3000 K. The work was aimed to investigate the influence of the two light spectra on plant development and comparing the results. Results showed that the different lighting treatments impact differently on plant development and on growth parameters.

The concept of Smart Campus started developing in the last years as a possible adaptation of the Smart city model to the university campuses. The transformation of a standard campus into a Smart Campus requires the development of an evaluation framework which allow to assess the state of the art by means of composite indicators. Following a new methodology, the aim of this project is to define a global set of indicators. Those composite indicators describe each aspect of the campus: (economic, energy environmental and social issues) in order to give a complete and holistic evaluation. The application on a real case study show the flexibility of this model.

This paper analyzes the impact of a change in the thermal insulating material on both the energy and environmental performance of a building, evaluated through two different green building assessment methods: Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and Istituto per l’innovazione e Trasparenza degli Appalti e la Compatibilità Ambientale (ITACA). LEED is one of the most qualified rating systems at an international level; it assesses building sustainability thanks to a point-based system where credits are divided into six different categories. One of these is fully related to building materials. The ITACA procedure derives from the international evaluation system Sustainable Building Tool (SBTool), modified according to the Italian context. In the region of Umbria, ITACA certification is composed of 20 technical sheets, which are classified into five macro-areas. The analysis was developed on a residential building located in the central Italy. It was built taking into account the principles of sustainability as far as both structural and technical solutions are concerned. In order to evaluate the influence of thermal insulating material, different configurations of the envelope were considered, replacing the original material (glass wool) with a synthetic one (expanded polystyrene, EPS) and two natural materials (wood fiber and kenaf). The study aims to highlight how the materials characteristics can affect building energy and environmental performance and to point out the different approaches of the analyzed protocols.