Retrofit strategies applied to a tertiary building assisted by Trnsys energy simulation tool

This paper describes an integrated passive design approach to reduce the heating demand for an existing tertiary building through an improved thermal envelope design and high efficiency windows. The numerical optimization has been performed dynamically by means of TRNSYS simulation tool. The model here treated is aimed at the determination of the thermal demand with reference to a tertiary building in Italy, which it is supposed to be located in two different climatic zones, i.e., Bologna and Rome. The final part of the paper deals with the investment costs analysis, applied to each retrofitting scenario: it has been demonstrated that the simple payback period results to be strongly affected by the climatic zone of the building location and by the national policies of fiscal incentives.