Abstract
The present research deals with the necessity of expressing all the different aspects of the building's performance looking beyond the mere energy behavior, considering the increased level of expectation related to either new constructions or the renovation of existing buildings. Even though building energy performance is one of the main aims of an appropriate design process or of a suitable management strategy in the operation phase, it can be strongly affected by the underestimation of different criticalities, which are mainly related to the quality of the indoor environment. A poor thermal or visual comfort, not only affects the satisfaction of the occupants for the indoor environment, but also induces actions and operations that ultimately compromise the energy efficiency. In order to avoid the possibility that a specific project configuration allow reaching a good energetic performance but not suitable internal comfort conditions, a designer should be able to evaluate since the very beginning how different project configurations can affect the comfort building's performance. As underlined in the Chapter 1, in the recent years many researchers tried to apply an integrated analysis approach to their studies, regardless from the aim of the research itself. Most of the papers underline the importance of evaluating the building's performance taking into accounts both energy consumption and internal comfort conditions, and they suggest including visual and thermal aspects. On the other hand, the lack of a standardized and consistent set of comfort metrics makes it difficult not only to conduct an integrated evaluation, but also to compare the results from different studies. The literature analysis underlined the necessity of defining a set of standardized comfort metrics able to express the time constancy or space uniformity of comfort and to evaluate different comfort aspects simultaneously with the energy behavior. Considering that both visual and thermal comfort aspects strictly depend on inlet solar radiation effects, in Chapter 2 the fenestration integrated performances have been compared through a parametric analysis in order to define weakness or strength points of different methodologic approach. The standard comfort metrics efficacy in describing the solar radiation effects on thermal and visual occupants' perception and energy consumption has been evaluated, with the aim of defining the best simulation approach for the analysis of the global building's performance. Chapter 3 presents an overview on the different thermal and visual comfort metrics available up to now, considering what international regulations and scientific works propose. Then, the methodologic approach to the definition of a set of synthetic metrics, which can help the designers to analyze and synthesize the global performance of different design characteristics considering together, and at the same time, energy needs and comfort conditions, has been described. In the fourth Chapter, the efficacy of the proposed metrics has been verified considering an open space office as reference test case as representative of a demanding building typology, because of the size of transparent surfaces, the concurrent relevance of the visual tasks and glare control, the limited possibility, for the occupants, to adapt their position to the transformation of the internal environmental conditions caused by the transient effects of the incoming solar radiation and, finally, the high level of internal gains. After demonstrating the metrics efficacy and considering the reliability of the current models for simulating glazing capacity of filtering and managing solar radiation, in the last Chapter the models for the roller shades simulation embedded in two different building simulation codes have been analyzed and compared through a set of measured data, recorded at the Bowen laboratories of the Purdue University (Indiana - USA).