Athilea, una herramienta de cálculo para el estudio de soluciones de aislamiento interior en fachadas

Abstract

Renovating a building can be a challenge when the urban, architectural, or constructive conditions do not enable insulation from the outside. Particularly when it involves increasing occupancy, reducing the separation to boundaries and/or invading adjoining party walls. To comply with the regulations and allow buildings to provide adequate levels of comfort and energy demand, the improvement of the thermal envelope will have to be carried out from the inside. This paper presents an Excel® VBA tool to assess the impact of façade insulation from the inside on the loss of usable floor area and demand improvement. Based on a catalogue of six buildings representative of the Spanish building stock (three multi-family buildings and three single-family buildings with different compactness, shape and volume), the user can define all the elements of the envelope, as well as the city, climate zone and insulation to be compared, making it possible to quantify the expected cost of floor loss and assess compliance with regulatory requirements in terms of energy savings. In this way, it is possible to make quick and accurate decisions for the deep renovation of a building to the level of nZEB or Passivhaus building, knowing its energy and economic implications.