Sustainable Church Heating: The Basilica di Collemaggio Case-Study

tHistoric building heating and, in particular, church heating represents a challenging task because manyobjectives have to be reached simultaneously; in facts, adequate thermal comfort levels have to be guar-anteed for the occupants while ensuring an optimal internal climate suitable for the preservation ofvaluable and often fragile building components and artworks. Moreover, current requirements for sus-tainability impose to make efforts, where possible, to minimize the amount of energy needed and theconsequent environmental impact. For such reasons, the present work addresses in detail the churchheating topic, by analysing different feasible strategies and developing subsequently an original technol-ogy, able to combine energy efficiency and cultural heritage preservation aspects. The application fieldof the study is represented by the Basilica di Collemaggio (L’Aquila, Italy), a church of worldwide rele-vance, currently under restoration. In detail, traditional heating strategies were compared with solutionsfor the local-comfort, such as the pew-based heating, and a novel hydronic high-efficiency pew-basedsystem was proposed and deeply analyzed. The work demonstrated that such solution is able to combinethe advantages obtainable from electric benches with those of a hydronic heating system coupled withground-source heat pumps, combining good local comfort levels to significant energy savings and lowor no impact on the artworks and building structures. The system design was based on a local-comfortassessment, supported by experimental and CFD analyses.