Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) factors usually considered in engineering studies, i.e., thermal, acoustical, visual comfort and indoor air quality are individually associated with the occupant satisfaction level on the basis of well-established relationships. On the other hand, the full understanding of how single IEQ factors contribute and interact to determine the overall occupant satisfaction (global comfort) is currently an open field of research. The lack of a shared approach in treating the subject depends on many aspects: absence of established protocols for the collection of subjective and objective measurements, the amount of variables to consider and in general the complexity of the technical issues involved. This case study is aimed to perform a comparison between some of the models available, studying the results of a survey conducted with objective and subjective method on a classroom within University of Roma TRE premises. Different models are fitted on the same measured values, allowing comparison between different weighting schemes between IEQ categories obtained with different methods. The critical issues, like differences in the weighting scheme obtained with different IEQ models and the variability of the weighting scheme with respect to the time of exposure of the users in the building, identified during this small scale comfort assessment study, provide the basis for a survey activity on a larger scale, basis for the development of an improved IEQ assessment method.

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Abstract:The Mediterranean architecture was characterized by passive solutions able to ensure thermal comfort conditions in the built environment during the hot season. This cultural heritage is almost disappeared, delegating the comfort conditions to artificial systems. One of the above mentioned passive solutions concerns the use of light colors to redirect most of the incident solar radiation. Cool roofs are a mix of these old concepts and modern technologies. The paper reports the results of a cool roof application in a senior recreation center, belonging to Roma Tre University. The cool roof was applied on a part of the whole surface of the roof in order to assess the difference in thermal conditions obtained with this solution compared to the original case. The experiment was carried out in two phases. During the first phase the building was monitored with sensors of temperature, humidity and solar radiation. The second phase concerned the creation of a building model inputted in a dynamic simulation tool used to evaluate the building performances due to this cooling technique. This study demonstrate the positive impact of the technology in terms of cooling and total energy savings as well as on the indoor thermal conditions in Mediterranean buildings.

The study of the building energy performance is based on simplified procedures that estimates the energy demand using monthly values of environmental parameters. It is well known that it is possible to use advanced dynamic softwares able to analyze the real building’s behavior along time. For this reason in this study a historical building energy retrofit has been performed through a dynamic software considering the influence of different kind of windowed elements on the annual energy demand. Four simulations, taking into account transparent elements characterized by progressively improved properties of thermal transmittance and solar gain factor, have been performed. The results obtained have been analyzed and compared.

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