Building energy consumption in China recently surpassed the US building consumption, and it is expected to increase significantly in the next decade pushed by the continuous population and urbanization increase. In response to that situation, the Chinese government introduced a series of building energy codes and rating systems to assess and enhance the building energy performance. The purpose ...

— This lecture summary provides a short but comprehensive overview on the “energy and buildings” topic. Buildings account for roughly 40% of the global energy demands. Thus, an increased adoption of existing and upcoming materials and solutions for the building sector represents an enormous potential to reduce building related energy demands and greenhouse gas emissions. The central question is...

A BIM interop-erable process for energy efficiency control in existing buildings, International Journal of De-As energy costs continue to rise, businesses need smarter energy management strategies. This paper starts with several definitions, then it discusses a method to help define a smart energy efficiency strategy in existing buildings by IT systems without realizing civil works. This method...

The Australian Building Greenhouse Rating (ABGR) scheme is a performance-based rating for office buildings. While it was originally designed for existing buildings, its success in that sector has led to its rapid adoption as a performance standard for new buildings. As a result of this application, there has been an upsurge in the use of simulation as a predictor of absolute performance. The pr...

In seismic risk mitigation policies, fragility functions of existing buildings play a fundamental role. In this paper, a procedure to develop analytical fragility curves for Moment Resisting Frame Reinforced Concrete buildings is presented. The design of the selected building typologies was performed according to the codes at the time of construction using force-based methods and the state of t...

The Italian building heritage is aged and inadequate to the high-performance levels required nowadays in terms of energy efficiency seismic response. Innovative techniques are generating a strong interest, especially multi-level approaches solution optimizations. Among these, Nested Buildings, an integrated intervention approach which preserves external existing structure provides new structura...

Phase change materials (PCM) are thermal storage materials with a high storage density for small temperature range applications. One such application is the storage of natural cold of the night to use during daytime, called “free cooling”. Very high energy efficiency can be reached as the cold has not to be generated. Those systems are especially interesting for lightweight buildings, which hea...