Toward integrated redevelopment of industrial buildings: a general intervention protocol and a case study

In Italy the industrial sector accounts for the 22% of the total final energy demand. Most of manufactures are characterised by critical energy issues as well as structural ones. The former mainly related to thermal insulation and airtightness and the latter to inadequate structural response of load bearing structure and connections in case of seismic events. This occurs because most of buildings are built before 90s. The research aims at defining a general retrofitting protocol for existing industrial buildings stock to improve the overall performance in an integrated way. The guideline consists in different proposals of improvement interventions concerning the external layout, the structure, the external envelope, and the systems. This tool can be applied to the different typological variants outlined in an earlier phase of the research. To validate the protocol, it was applied to an existing industrial building in Tuscany chosen as a case study, belonged to one of this variant. The only structural and technological redevelopment of the roof floor results in an energy saving equal to 38% while an integral retrofitting of the whole external envelope lets to achieve a decrease in primary energy demand equal to 73%.