Methodological procedure for energy performance evaluation of historical buildings

The most suitable intervention for energy rehabilitation of historical buildings has to reach both the goal of the optimization of the energy saving and the preservation of the building. The appropriate assessment of the building and its history is required in advance to achieve both these goals. The objective of the present research is to propose a methodology to evaluate the energetic features of historical buildings and also to evaluate the reliability of the existing software, mostly designed for the contemporary architecture, when applied on historical buildings. First of all the procedure requires to collect the necessary information (seldom available also before the energetic assessment) to describe the building. The authors examined three selected software (Archisun, Casanova and Claca) on three small solid masonry buildings. The results show the inaccuracy due to the approximation (or missing) of the input data and calculation parameters. The features of historical buildings are hardly represented by the parameter-range and descriptions of these tools, due to the differences in the materials and morphology with respect to contemporary architectures. The further step of the research is the development of new software based on a multidisciplinary approach involving physicists and conservators.