Plenary Lecture

Plenary Lecture

Energy Efficiency, Exergy and Comfort in the Buildings


Professor Lamberto Tronchin
DIENCA – CIARM
University of Bologna
Viale Risorgimento, 2
40136 Bologna, Italy
E-mail: Lamberto.tronchin@unibo.it


Abstract: Among the objectives of the Directive 2002/91/EC, the building wrapper represents a very important building subsystem to control energy dispersion and consumption. The Architect should be able to change the wrapper energy performance in order to control energy consumption. How to value and compare this energy dispersion with exergy analysis? How to relate energy/exergy analysis with thermal comfort?
The building wrapper should satisfy two tasks:
- to reduce energy dispersion during winter time (especially in northern European buildings),
- to guarantee thermal phase displacement during summer time (especially in southern European buildings).
In Mediterranean area both task must be satisfied all over the year. The project calculates thermic isolation and phase displacement (of walls or windows or other building wrapped subsystems) in relation with energy transfer.
In this paper an energy valuation of building wrapper energy transfer is calculated. Heat exergy through wrapper transfer depends on temperature gap and heat transfer. Heat flow through walls depends on thermo-physics characteristics of the material. Heat exergy transfer could be used to evaluate an exergy flow through walls, and an exergy index could be settled to compare different walls. Moreover, the thermo-physics parameters could be correlated with heat exergy transfer and isolation heat flow through wrapper, and with thermal comfort in building, not excluding natural lighting and sound insulation.

Brief biography of the speaker:
Dr Lamberto Tronchin is Associate Professor in Environmental Physics from the University of Bologna. A pianist himself, with a diploma in piano from the Conservatory of Reggio Emilia, Dr Tronchin's principal area of research has been musical acoustics, room acoustics, signal processing, energy efficiency of buildings, exergy analysis and thermal comfort. He is the author of more than 170 papers and was Chair of the Musical Acoustics Group of the Italian Association of Acoustics from 2000 to 2008. Dr Tronchin is a member of the Scientific Committee of the CIARM, the Inter- University Centre of Acoustics and Musical research, has chaired sessions of acoustics and heat transfer during several international symposiums, been a referee for a number of International journals.
He was a visiting researcher at the University of Kobe in Japan, a visiting professor at the University of Graz in Austria and Special honored International Guest at the International Workshop, ‘Analysis, Synthesis and Perception of Music Signals', at Jadavpur University of Kolkata, India in 2005. He has chaired the International Advanced Course on Musical Acoustics (IACMA), organised with the European Association of Acoustics, which was held in Bologna, in 2005. In 2008 and 2009 he gave plenary lectures at several International Congresses, including Vancouver, Prague, Bucharest, Santander. He designed theatres and other buildings, as consultant, in collaboration with several Architects, among them Richard Meier and Paolo Portoghesi.

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