Benimpact Suite: A Tool for ZEB Performance Assesment

In the last years there has been a big development of European policies and regulations on energy saving topics. This is due to the will to reach the target of 20-20-20. Buildings consume a lot of energy, so the legal framework related to the reduction energy consumption in this sector has had a huge evolution. The “nearly zero energy building” (nZEB) concept was introduced in 2010, 8 years after the release of the original EPBD directive. By 2020 all new buildings and buildings that are subject to renovation should have very low energy consumption, covered for the major part by renewable sources. Designing and realizing this kind of building is a very ambitious task, which needs to be supported by appropriate tools and software. This paper presents a new tool for assessing buildings performance, named BENIMPACT Suite (Building’s ENvironmental IMPACT evaluator & optimizer), and developed by EnginSoft (Italy). The suite is organized in different core modules that allow to verify how the building performance level is influenced by different design choices such as envelope shape and materials, plant systems, renewable sources use, etc. One of the test cases used to validate BENIMPACT Suite energy performance evaluations an interesting Italian ZEB, finished in 2010 and called CasaZeroEnergy. It is located in Felettano (UD-Italy), a small town in the North-East. This building is an experimental house designed and monitored by the Laboratory of Building Design of the University of Trento (Italy) and built by Polo Le Ville Plus Group (Cassacco-Italy). Energy performance of this building was modeled and evaluated using BENIMPACT Suite, and simulation results were compared with monitored data.