Abstract - "Exergy Performance as a measure of building efficiency" - KEP energy

The energy and environmental impacts resulting from the buildings sector are one of the impending problems to which is addressed the international attention. The main strategies implemented to answer to these problems are the energy efficiency improvement and the renewable energy sources use. The key subject discussed in this paper is the building energy performance assessment.

The paper has the purpose to show that a First Law evaluation is not able to give a complete building energy impact assessment, and it could be misleading. Therefore it proposes exergy as a complementary assessment index, in order to achieve a better description of the concept “building energy impact on the environment”.

In the first section, we present the indices currently used for energy performance evaluation. We focus on the indices defined by European regulation in the building sector, and we underline their limits and problems. In the second section we introduce the exergy as a complementary index. This index is a possible answer to the limits and the problems previously identified. Finally in the third section we present three case-studies, analyzed through transient simulation software. The aim of the numerical simulation is to make simple and intuitive the difference between the energy assessment and the exergy assessment of a building.

L'articolo completo è pubblicato in Proceedings of iiSBE Forum of Young Researchers in Sustainable Building 2013, Praga (Czech Republic), 25-26 giugno 2013.