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Investigating the effect of tightening residential envelopes in the Mediterranean region

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conference contribution
posted on 2016-05-19, 12:52 authored by Georgios Georgiou, Mahroo EftekhariMahroo Eftekhari, Tom Lupton
Nowadays, buildings are responsible for the 40% of energy consumption (36% of greenhouse gas emissions) in the European Union. The European Council pointed out the need to refurbish a large amount of the existing building inventory, as new buildings are related to the 1-2% of the total energy consumption. Air-infiltration and tightness of buildings are usually neglected parameters during retrofitting or building design, especially in the Southern European counterparts, where air-tightness standards are absent from the national building regulations. To this effect, this study investigates the impact of tightening existing residential envelopes, focusing on the impact to the default construction and synergies arisen between air-tightness and other interventions (i.e. thermal insulation). The study was undertaken in the Mediterranean climate conditions, examining detached houses located in Cyprus. This is the first study in national level, presenting the air-tightness characteristics of buildings as these were collected by a blower door test. In general, the outcome shows that the improvement of air-tightness primarily reduces the energy associated with winter thermal loads. Apart from that the tightness of building envelopes beneficially contributes on the performance of other energy saving measures. In particular, the reduction by thermal insulation can be enhanced up to 12%, while the synergy with a glazing system may reduce heating demand up to 7%.

History

School

  • Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering

Published in

14th International Conference on Sustainable Energy Technologies – SET 2015

Pages

1 - 10 (10)

Citation

GEORGIOU, G., EFTEKHARI, M. and LUPTON, T., 2015. Investigating the effect of tightening residential envelopes in the Mediterranean region. IN: Rodrigues, L. (ed.) 14th International Conference on Sustainable Energy Technologies (SET 2015), University of Nottingham: Architecture, Energy & Environment Research Group, 25-27th Aug, Vol 3, pp. 379-388, Available from: eprints.nottingham.ac.uk [Last accessed 18/07/2016].

Publisher

© University of Nottingham and WSSET

Version

  • SMUR (Submitted Manuscript Under Review)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2015-04-20

Publication date

2015

Notes

This paper is a conference paper.

ISBN

9780853583158

Language

  • en

Location

Nottingham