Monitoring of the indoor microclimate in hospital environments a case study the Papardo hospital in Messina

Abstract

The Italian hospitals are housed in old buildings, some statistics report refers which they have should be about of fifty years old. Recently new structures were built, but the trend is that over restructure and/or redevelop existing buildings, making by a cost-benefit analysis that supports this choice. The Italian construction industry covers the most part of the national energy requirements, and the hospital have a big energy request because the buildings of different areas with different destinations represent the major demand of the needed energy sector.Hospitals must observe the same climate conditions, although the average fuel consumption is three times more than the average values of the residential construction sector.The energy demand in this sector have been used in different way: air conditioning in summer and winter, ventilation, environments lighting, domestic hot water, steam generation for sterilization and humidification, as well as the request by the kitchens, laundries, domestic transport, computers, diagnostic and therapeutic devices, etc.Furthermore, this demand should be absolutely guaranteed, in particular for the thermal and electrical installations, for everyday of the year.The complexity of the equipment used and the regulatory compliance in terms of temperature, humidity and air flow, it could lead considerable consumption, increasing the difficulty of management plants.However, the hospital buildings have a large energy savings potential, which could be achieved improving efficiency of building-plant systems, management of energy.The air conditioning systems of the hospitalization facility should meet specific technical and functional requirements in order to ensure compliance with the temperature-humidity requirements of itself.The regulatory and legislative system should pay attention to the standards and the eligibility criteria for these environments, such as the rooms to be used as hospital stays, providing a strategy to obtain higher values of comfort and safety.The ABSTRACTIn hospitals, the requirements relating at comfort thermo-hygrometric, lighting and air quality, play a major role and are related, at the characteristics of the building-plant system, and to the activities that take place in it. The climate control of the environments constitutes a major problem in the hospital field, and it has effects not only in the realization of new facilities, but also in the renovations. The systems must be designed and engineered with a full integration with the global project, which is simple in the case of new construction, more difficult in the event of restructuring, since it is necessary to interact with restrictive constraints conditioning, such a distribution of complex and articulated spaces. In design of the systems of a hospital building, two fundamental aspects must be ensured: total control of the thermo-hygrometric parameters (temperature, humidity and air velocity), and the possibility of the control and adjusting -for the single areasof flows and air changes within i...

Indoor Air Quality in Healthcare Units—A Systematic Literature Review Focusing Recent Research

“…The importance of design characteristics for adequate IAQ assurance is well established [24,47,48]. Nevertheless, there are still improvement opportunities regarding the choices of products and construction materials [10,26,49,50], as well as of daily activities' products [5,48,51,52]; special attention needs to be given to engineering procedures and maintenance activities [5,25,36,[53][54][55].…”

“…There is also a recognized difficulty in conciliating strategies to address different indoor air pollutants occurring simultaneously [22]-recent concern has arisen regarding the formation of secondary indoor pollutants from the reaction between primary pollutants and/or other compounds present indoors or introduced by ventilation [23]. There is an increasing research interest in the design and rehabilitation of healthcare infrastructures, given the influence of construction and finishing materials in IAQ [9,[24][25][26][27].…”

Energy Consumption Analysis and Characterization of Healthcare Facilities in the United States

“…Morgenstern et al (2016) studied electricity consumption data in 28 departments across eight medium-to-large general acute hospitals in England and confirmed that different departments have considerably nonhomogeneous electricity consumption characteristics [13]. Studies in [14][15][16][17] provided an estimation of the energy requirements in healthcare facilities by considering basic services such as lighting and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment, and medical and laboratory equipment in non-critical, non-secured, and secured categories. They also reviewed different energy-production and energy-storage technologies for healthcare systems.…”

Islands "Smart Energy" for eco-sustainable energy a case study "Favignana Island"

“…The use of smart technologies "e-sensors" in the field of environmental monitoring, in residential buildings [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], hospitals and in the field of the historical buildings under protection and safeguard, will make achieve significant developments in the "smart city" and "smart islands", encouraging the growth of tourism and quality of life. The use of renewable energy in the new technologies and plant systems [30][31][32][33][34][35], will make a significant contribution to the sustainable development of Smarts Islands.…”