Management of Indoor Thermal Conditions in Heavy and Lightweight Buildings: An Experimental Comparison

In a Nearly Zero Energy Building (NZEB) design framework, passive design techniques are fundamental to guarantee indoor comfort of occupants, also ensuring a low energy consumption. Among these techniques, internal area heat capacity (IAHC) design still needs further field studies in full-scale constructions: a simple change in this parameter, without varying the mass of the load-bearing walls structure, can positively affect the whole building thermal behavior. Furthermore, combining this design solution with the automated control of windows shadings can help avoiding high temperature peaks due to uncontrolled solar gains. The present paper focuses on the monitoring of the indoor thermal conditions in four real scale residential buildings in the Alpine region of Northern Italy. The buildings present four different combinations of lightweight and massive load-bearing and interior cladding structure. After a first 8-days period of comparison of the pure thermal performance of the four structures, the impact of automated shadings, controlled by a basic and simplified algorithm, on lightweight cladding buildings was studied by means of a second monitoring period of eleven days. Besides confirming the remarkable impact of massive cladding on buildings’ thermal performance, the results showed that the basic automated regulation of shadings allowed to mitigate the lower thermal performances of lightweight cladding, also potentially improving the indoor thermal comfort conditions.