Assessing the impact of climate change on energy retrofit of alpine historic buildings: consequences for the hygrothermal performance

Abstract

Climate change will affect future hygrothermal performance of buildings. This could lead to higher risks regarding energy optimization, thermal comfort and historic building conservation depending on the local climate, building construction and retrofit solutions adopted. This paper explores the risks brought by climate change on a typical residential historic building of South Tyrol. The results obtained show that, although the climate warming will reduce the future heating energy demand, an improvement of buildings’ energy performance will still be necessary to increase sustainability and ensure their continued use. Natural ventilation would suffice to prevent overheating in the studied location, but a further analysis is needed for warmer alpine regions. Regarding the moisture-related risks for the historic construction, mould growth should be considered when retrofitting a wooden wall and frost damage should be carefully studied in the case of sandstone walls.

Factorial Study on the Impact of Climate Change on Freeze-Thaw Damage, Mould Growth and Wood Decay in Solid Masonry Walls in Brussels

“…This is especially the case when precipitation loads are also projected to increase. Further, Hao et al studied mould growth, interstitial condensation and freeze-thaw damage in interior insulated historical Alpine buildings [16]. Sahyoun et al assessed the freeze-thaw risk in interior insulated historical masonry walls in Ottawa, Canada [17].…”

Hygrothermal Behavior of Cultural Heritage Buildings and Climate Change: Status and Main Challenges

“…Two other papers are found in the "International Journal of Global Warming", addressing indoor environmental conditions of CH The institutions that published more documents on this topic are listed in Table 2. Additionally, it can be stated that the topic has been fairly distributed in terms of source: if the journal publication contribution was evaluated separately, the maximum number of papers published in a source was three, namely, in "IOP Conference Series Earth And Environmental Science 2020 and 2021" [40][41][42]. Then, follows "Energy and Buildings", with two papers [43,44].…”

“…According to the Scopus search, the most productive authors in the field have all published two documents, namely: Del Pero C. [40,47], Greenan R. [48,49], Silva H.E., and Henriques F.M.A [45,50], and Tagliabue L.C. [28,41].…”

Assessment of frost damage risk in a historic masonry wall due to climate change

“…A well-accepted method to assess the frost damage risk of masonry buildings is by counting the freeze-thaw cycles that their building materials experience. The freeze-thaw events can be calculated by considering climate-based indices (Viles, 2002;Grossi et al, 2007;Sabbioni et al, 2010;Leissner et al, 2015;Loli and Bertolin, 2018) or material response-based indices (Sedlbauer and Kunzel, 2000;Straube and Burnett, 2005;Straube and Schumacher, 2006;Mantha and Arena, 2012;De Rose et al, 2014;Van Aarle et al, 2015;Vandemeulebroucke et al, 2019Vandemeulebroucke et al, , 2020Vandemeulebroucke et al, , 2021aZhou et al, 2020;Hao et al, 2020;Sahyoun et al, 2020).…”

“…Past, present, and potential future conditions were assessed by using data from a climate model derived from the EURO-CORDEX project data archive (Jacob et al, 2014). Data from ERA5 (Hersbach et al, 2020) were used to assess the accuracy of the climate model results. The frost damage risk according to the material response-based index was calculated for eight different orientations, i.e., the cardinal and the intermediate ones, and two different indoor climate cases corresponding to a worstcase and a best-case scenario.…”