• Energy Research

The indoor climate of libraries and archives is determinant for the preservation of their collections, as temperature and relative humidity can trigger other damage factors. Standards and literature recommend to perform long term monitoring to understand the climatic history where the goods were kept, instead of follow rigid and arbitrary conditions. This trend is sustainable and environmentally friendly, but adds a new duty to the overloaded staff. We present two technical advices sustained in monitoring records produced to assess the HVAC equipment and reused to preservation purposes. The first is a library collection transferred from a historic building to a new building, and the second is a deposit room supplied with de-humidificators, where the analysis evidenced a very low humidity ratio. The main conclusion is that a synergetic use of monitoring data can improve the indoor climate of the collections and reduce the energy demand for preservation.

Abstract The common approach for libraries to preserve their paper-based collections from irreversible deterioration is by controlling quantitative parameters, such as temperature and relative humidity. Variations of these parameters for preventive conservation can be expressed by the “performance index” (PI) and the “amplitude index” (AI). Building envelope is the first filter of the external climate, buffering the external weather fluctuations and maintaining the building's indoor climate stable. Its shape, window areas and envelope materials are the most influential parameters. As they capture the relationship of a few geometric and physical variables with the building's performance, the envelope characteristics can be expressed as certain passive envelope indexes. This paper studies the relationship of certain passive envelope indexes and the preventive conservation indexes for books for several libraries and archives located in La Plata, Argentina. The results show the impact of every passive envelope index upon the preventive conservation indexes. The compactness, heaviness, adjacency to spaces and adjacency to ground have a positive linear correlation meanwhile transparency and global transmittance are parameters with a negative correlation. In general, the most influential parameter is the relative area adjacent to other spaces, followed by global transmittance, transparency, heaviness, relative area adjacent to ground and compactness.

In a planet with limited resources, climate change is a severe problem, intensified by industrial development. This is particularly important in the construction sector. According to the International Energy Agency (2021), the construction sector is responsible for 40% of the global energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions. In this way, sustainable architectural solutions should be a priority in our fight against climate change, for it is necessary to propose solutions that help to reuse existing resources, thus reducing consumption. In this sense, the rehabilitation of buildings with solutions that favor the circular economy will become a key element in the construction sector. This work provides the design of a facade for building rehabilitation based on the circular economy paradigm, which is implanted in a model building as a case study. The HULC tool quantifies the improvement in energy efficiency that this rehabilitation entails when compared to a conventional facade. With the designed facade, a reduction in energy losses through the envelope is achieved, as well as an improvement in living conditions and environmental impact. Next, an analysis of the building’s energy consumption and CO2 emissions is carried out with the Open BIM Quantities tool. This tool is used by construction researchers and professionals. Finally, the results show the improvements in the rehabilitation of the facade.

In recent years, the building sector has been turning towards intervening in the existing city building stock. In fact, it is generally accepted that the refurbishment of buildings based on sustainability must form the axis of reformulation of the building sector. Although energy refurbishment is commonly accepted and recommended towards decarbonization of the building stock, an integral assessment towards implementing the principles of the circular economy must incorporate the environmental impact of the materials in order to get an eco-efficient refurbishment. The article presents the environmental analysis of a social housing located in Cadiz (Spain) and the improvements achieved by its refurbishment. This intervention is improved by incorporating eco-efficient materials based on the environmental and life cycle analysis (LCA). Those analyses are performed using EnergyPlus, Radiance, LCA standards, and Environmental Product Declaration of the products. The results shown that although an energy rehabilitation intervention can fulfil other eco-efficient aspects, an integral assessment should always be carried out in order to ensure that indoor comfort is achieved, daylighting and solar heat gains are balanced, and the environmental impact at product, use, and end-of-life stages of a building is minimized. Considering the constrains and limitations of the tools and databases, higher efforts should be done to solve them and provide useful resources for a decarbonized and circular building stock.

Having a tool in Spanish regulations to evaluate the sustainability of the construction process in a simple and efficient way (Annex 13 of the Structural Concrete Instruction EHE-08) means an advance with respect to regulations in other countries. However, the complexity of homogenising the conditions that affect the execution of each structure, which are of a very heterogeneous and variable nature, in order to be able to evaluate their contribution to sustainability within the same reference framework, is the greatest obstacle and can have a great influence on the representativeness of the obtained results. However, there are variables that, given their specificity and nature, are not contemplated in this methodology (dust, noise and vibration emission, transportation). This paper proposes a complementary disaggregated model to evaluate the sustainability of variables that are not considered, namely the transportation of materials to the worksite, the commute of workers, the construction process, the emissions of dust, noise and vibrations, as well as the necessary load tests. The results of the application of this model to the real case of the foundations of two singular buildings, show the importance that these previously unexamined variables can have when choosing the most sustainable technical solution in terms of CO2 emissions.

La investigación realizada en el presente trabajo plantea la generación de un modelo de cuantificación de las emisiones de CO2 producidas en la ejecución del modelo constructivo habitual definido como el bloque residencial destinado a viviendas de protección oficial, derivadas del proceso de fabricación de los recursos materiales empleados en su ejecución. La identificación y cuantificación de los materiales de construcción consumidos, permitirá conocer el impacto medioambiental que produce la tipología definida, a través de uno de los indicadores de impacto ambiental más relevantes asociados al peso por m2 de construcción, como son las emisiones de CO2 derivadas del proceso de fabricación de los materiales de construcción empleados en su ejecución. Su aplicación práctica a un conjunto de diez proyectos de ejecución ubicados en Sevilla, proporcionará datos concluyentes sobre la cuantificación de las emisiones de CO2 producidas en su ejecución, identificando los de mayor impacto ambiental.

Fil: Camporeale, Patricia. Universidad Nacional de la Plata. Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo. Laboratorio de Arquitectura y Habitat Sustentable; Argentina