37º IAHS World Congress on Housing: - Universidad de Cantabria

XXXVII <strong>IAHS</strong><strong>World</strong> <strong>Congress</strong> on HousingOctober 26 – 29, 2010, Santander, SpainCODE: 421BUILDING DESIGN AND THERMAL INERTIA: WHEN,WHY, WHERERossano Albatici, Serena PenasaDepartment of Civil and Environmental EngineeringUniversity of Trento, Trento (Italy)e-mail: rossano.albatici@unitn.itKey words: building envelope, thermal comfort, thermal inertia, parametric analysisAbstractIn the last years, building regulation and technical standard concerning energy efficient designand indoor comfort conditions addressed their attention most of all to the thermalcharacteristics of the envelope and to the energy systems. Other aspects of the design processare often underestimated and delegated to the experience and knowledge of single designersas, for example, the building shape (internal and external), the dimension and the materials ofthe building elements.In this context, at the Laboratory of Building Design of the University of Trento a researchhas been carried on whose object is to give useful indication for the design of energy efficientbuildings taking into account some specific parameters between which the position of thethermal mass of both the envelope and the inner horizontal partitions (floors), the windowspercentage on the south façade, the influence of inner heat gain, of shutters, of night passiveventilation.In particular, a single family house has been designed as prototype building to be studied bymeans of parametric analysis with dynamic state modeling. The influence of thermal inertia(in particular the superficial thermal capacity and the periodic thermal transmittance) has beenanalyzed in different configuration considering the users activity in the building (withparticular reference to the use of shutters) and the thermal transmittance of the buildingenvelope as invariant.The building presents a rectangular plant given by the sum of simple squared modules, themain axis has a east-west direction and, in the so called “base configuration”, the windowssurface of the south façade is the 30% of the overall surface.Comparing the hourly trend of indoor air temperature in the base configuration with the onesin the others configurations, the maximum, minimum and average deviation in different hoursof the day have been evaluated considering the dynamicity of the envelope and the influenceon inner comfort conditions using, during summer period, the adaptive comfort theory.37º <strong>IAHS</strong> <strong>World</strong> <strong>Congress</strong> On Housing Science 210