Search results for " Building Sector"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Energy Use in the Building Sector and Climate Change: Modeling, Developments, and Future Trends
2020
Climate change is going to have significant impacts among a wide range of areas and domains, including the building sector, characterized by constructions which may not be designed to be resilient to the evolutions in the warming climate that will occur in the next decades. The chapter investigates methodologies and approaches connected to the assessment of the effects of climate change to the energy use within the building sector. Methodologies are compared and the most relevant future trends expected are traced for the current century.
An overview of sustainability issues in manufacturing and building sector: a life cycle assessment approach
2014
In the latest decades, the industrial consumption of materials and energy has undergone a growth which may exceed the limits of earth resources. Therefore, a strong awareness of the need to use materials and energy in a more efficient way has arisen. A wide research interest on sustainability is present in the modern technical literature: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology and Design for Environment (DFE) procedures are nowadays widely investigated in many research labs all over the world. In this context, this paper focuses on LCA approaches in two main fields: manufacturing and building sector. As the former is regarded, sustainability issues are crucial topics and the reduction of e…
Comparative LCA of renovation of buildings towards the nearly Zero Energy Building
2018
The building sector is one of the key sectors to achieve the 20/20/20 targets of the EU as there is the potential to lead to significant energy savings reducing the EU’s total energy consumption by 5-6% and lowering CO2 emissions by 5%. One powerful mechanism to apply principle and criteria of nearly zero-energy buildings (nZEB). This work, done in the framework of the agreement between the Italian Ministry of Economic development and ENEA on the “Research of electric system” (Ricerca di Sistema Elettrico), has the aim to evaluate the environmental impacts of the technological improvements needed for enhancing the performances of an average building to a nZEB (or at least in the direction o…
A new approach to model the effect of climate change on the building sector: A climate models data fusion
2020
Several climate models have been developed and used to forecast the effects of the climate changes, however the variability of results due to different models lead to a significant uncertainty on the estimation of the building energy use for the next century. In this context, the paper analyses this uncertainty and combines different climate models in order to improve the robustness of energy consumption predictions. The data of the climate models were then used to generate hourly weather files for the future period 2020-2099 and energy simulations for a case study located in Palermo (Italy) were performed. Results show a wide variability among all models (either alone or combined with our …
Climate change in the building sector: a scenario analysis in the Mediterranean basin
The paper presents an energy simulation-based study to investigate the impacts of climate change on the building energy use for heating and cooling in the Mediterranean basin.
Life-Cycle Assessment of Buildings
2019
The chapter presents a complete overview of LCA applied to buildings. After a brief introduction on the origin and developments of the LCA, it describes four steps of the LCA methodology, according to the framework of the International standards of ISO 14040 series. Then, the authors focus on the LCA applied to the building sector and on the standard EN 15978. They identify the main issues related to the application of the methodology to buildings, such as the selection of the functional unit, the systems boundaries,the environmental indicators, etc. In the context of the sustainability, a brief overview on the economic and social aspects of buildings and on the available building life-cycl…