The first is a two floors row house, whose geometry is presented
in Fig. 1. The building is divided into two thermal zones:
the day zone at the ground level, where almost all the daytime
activities take place; the night zone at the upper floor, hosting
bedrooms and services. The houses is in contact with the external
environment through the roof, the ground floor and the north and
south fac¸ ades, while the east and west walls are adiabatic, assuming
they are boundary layers between adjacent row houses. The
main thermo-physical data are summarised in Table 3. The not
insulated configuration considers a conventional double glazing
unit, whose g-value is 0.75, this value decreases to 0.65 for the insulated configuration, where a low-e double glazing units is considered.
The windows are provided of an external shading device
(30% solar transmittance and 10% solar absortpance). Assumptions
are also made regarding the occupancy profile, the electric
and the appliances loads. The natural ventilation/infiltration was
fixed at 0.5 ACH. Since the net energy has to be calculated, the
following hypotheses are assumed: the set-point temperature is
continuously maintained constant and heating and cooling system
generators of unlimited power are implemented to keep this condition.
The air exchange rate is increased to 3 volumes per hour for
the free floating analysis, that is carried out to assess the impact
of the roof solutions on the indoor thermal comfort of not cooled
buildings.