Entrant details
Role or Job Title on the Project
Support to energy refurbishment design
Employer
University "La Sapienza" of Rome
Employer Role
Academic or Research Institution
Are you or your employer a member of buildingSMART?
No
Submission details
Submitting Party Company Name
Sapienza
Submitting Party Company Location
Rome, Italy
Submitting Party Role on Project
thesis
Submitting Party Company Website
Full Project Name
Use of BIM to improve the energy performance of the existing multifunctional centre "Ciro Colonna"
Project Location (Country)
Italy
Project Objectives
The project objectives are:
- to reproduce the geometric design of existing building
- to gather information about opaque and transparent walls thermal properties
- to use BIM, integrated with above information, to evaluate the yearly energy consumption of the building
- to use this data to design HAVC system integrated with automation systems to ensure the best energy performance and comfort
- to share the BIM model with all professionals and the final user of the building to ensure the optimal use of spaces.
- to use the BIM model to manage and maintain the building
- to use the BIM model for training purpose
openBIM Achievements
The project has been carried out by different voluntaries professionals keen to support a non profit association. OpenBIM has allowed them to share, since the beginning, the same design realized with Archicad and then transfered as IFC files to Acca sowftare dealing with energy analysis. Structural engineers used the same model to identify the places where to perform structural analysis such as drillings. This activities was needed to identify the best possibility for istalling photovoltaic plant on the roof integrated with heat pump for HAVC system. The model was used by final users to identify zones for the multifunctional center
openBIM used
IFC 2x3, IDM, MVD
Software used
ARCHICAD, TerMus, ACCA Platform, Solibri Model Checker, Cypetherm, Termolog
Strategic Alignment
Through the use of OpenBIM it was possible to create a single file readable by all the professionals involved, making the process faster, cheaper and of better quality.
In addition, the professionals who worked on a voluntary basis were able to obtain all the information without having to carry out inspections, thus saving travel costs as well new relief of the same building. The work is still in progress and in the end will reduce the costs for maintenance and it will be used as training tool for disadvantaged young people
Highlights
The design of the school was generated by the point cloud and transformed in IFC files
IFC files were imported into Energy analysis software to evaluate the energy consumption as it is and as it will be, to take informed decisions
Structural engineers used the model to plan surveys and cores
The model, enriched with information of the installed plants, will be used to maintain the building
Project Website
Project Address
The building was former elementary school that, thanks to the new design developed using software BIM, will be revamped and used as a social and training center to enable young people, who have not been able to finish their studies, to be trained to find a job. The final BIM model will be used for training purposes and for managing the facilities by the users of the centre, through self-construction to reduce maintenance costs.
Project Type
Institutional
Size of Project
There are two buildings, the first one is the gym with 350 square metres and the second one is a building on two floors with almost 3650 square metres.
All of the design work, carried till now, was performed by five design companies. The cost, that can be valued around 100,000 euros, has been offered free of charge by IBIMI's members
There are other 150,000 euros to repair and insulate the roof and to install the photovoltaic system, donated by ENEA.
The owner has planned to install a tri-generation for HAVC system that costs 150,000 euros.
Detailed description of the project
During my thesis, as final work to graduate in electrical engineer, I was involved in the project of energy requalification and change of use of an existing school building. The school is located in one of the poorest area of Naples and it was abandoned last year, because of the lack of maintenance as well as for demographic decrease.
Maestri di strada, which is an association of educators and professionals working against early school leaving and promoting the citizenship of young people, obtained the concession for the use of part of the school by the Naples municipality. The agreement singed, foresees the energy refurbishment of the scholl and the functional requalification of the building to allow the organization of the training center and other social activities.
Maestri di strada (street teachers) asked help to the Italian bSI chapter to realize the project in BIM in order to analyse the different solutions, looking for the cheapest one, and also to use the model for the management and the maintenance of the building. A very ambitious objective wasalso to use this final model as an instrument of the training centre to teach self-construction to the student of the school as well as for the local citizens. The aim is also to use the center as a training centre for the use of BIM for the refurbishment of other schools. Agreement with the nearby University Federico II is under way.
The school, in fact, is representative of the 45% of all the schools in Italy with very poor energy performance.
As the Maestri di strada is a not for profit social organisation, Italian bSI members decided to support for free this association with their work. My role was to interface with all the different members and supervise the exchange of information. The following are the different contributes:
Two architects of Federico II university realized an IFC model in Revit, taking manual measures, as the original design of the school were lost in a probably arson. The model was readable on Termus as a BIM object but it lacked all the stratigraphic information. Besides, it was not possible to work with the proprietary file.
Tamburry SrL used the laser scanner to produce a point cloud survey to have a more reliable geometry of all the building.
Minnucci Associati has developed the 3D model in Archicad faithfully respecting the dimensions of wall thicknesses and space divisions needed for the eergy analysis.
ETS performed a geotechnical sampling, from which it was possible to insert more stratigraphic information including the thermal properties of opaque and transparent surfaces.
ENEA technicians, the ESCO COAF srl and myself performed the energy diagnosis based on presumed consumption as it was not possible to recover bills related to use of the school in the previous years.
The new file was tested by myself on three different software. The main import difficulties were for curtein walls and columns that were not generally recognized by energy software. In addition, thermal bridges are never present while they are essential to guarantee the internal comfort and healthiness of the premises. Finally, from a simplified model it was possible to derive the KWh years consumed.
Starting from this information, several analyses were made on the different technologies selecting the most convenient in the medium-long term. The photovoltaic panels were partly donated by ENEA and partly proposed by an ESCo.
Different solutions for the redevelopment of the building have been evaluated, among them:
- Radiant panels
- Photovoltaic
- Geothermal heat pumps
- Compression heat pump
- Absorption heat pump
- Use of batteries
- Outer coat
- Change of fixtures
The solutions chosen foresee, as first action, the installation of a wooden insulating roof already prepared for anchoring photovoltaic panels and the use of an absorption heat pump powered by thermal energy.
In this way a reduction of the primary energy consumption is possible, by removing the two 300 KW methane boilers each, with an absorption heat pump powered by thermal energy. This also makes possible to create an off grid electrical system powered by photovoltaic panels in which the excess energy feeds a battery and when the battery is saturated it sells the energy to the grid. Electrical equipment such as lights, sensors, computer sockets and mobile phones are all supported by photovoltaic panels that produces electricity. To optimize the entire flow, it was decided to use home automation monitoring systems with an intuitive user interface using the BIM model.
Because of the lack of funding Maestri di Strada is applying for national incentives and donations. At the moment the change of the fixtures is postponed even if they are highly inefficient having only one glass and having the iron frame without thermal break.
All the reports produced till now, were uploaded in the CDE offered by ACCA software, so that all professionals could access and consult the uploaded information, saving time and costs and imporving the quality of the work carried out.
Through this collaboration, a coordination between the users of the property and the energy engineer was carried out, allowing to make a detailed use profile for each classroom of the property in order to estimate the consumption.
In this case we could say that BIM has been very useful to allow end users to make informed decisions for the definition of their functional and informative requirements of the structure that they will have to use and manage.
Detailed description of openBIM on the project
The use of standards for openBIM during this project was far from an easy process. As an energy engineer, I had never used geometric modeling programs, because my part of the work comes downstream of preliminary modeling.
Two university students from the university Federuci II, in Naples, generated a 3D model of the building using Revit. However, the file was not readable with the software I was using. In addiction, the geometry was very approximative because the original drawings had been lost. The two students took the measurements manually that were, therefore, not very reliable. To ensure precision, a survey of the existing building was realized with a laser scanner that produced a point cloud.
Minnucci Associati used Grapishoft’s Archicad to generate a new file that would be exportable as IFC and in which I initially included key information for energy calculations such as stratigraphy, wall thickness and their composition.
This way, once selected the information to be exported, the IFC file was imported into the energy software TERMUS, that recognized all the elements and associated them to its internal default library of elements. Wherever the information was not correct or missing, I inserted new elements specifying all the fundamental characteristics for the energy calculation, such as thermal capacity, transmittance, thickness, frontal mass and so on.
The main import/export problem has been the impossibility, from energy software like Termolog (Logicalsoft) and Termus (ACCA software), to recognize some fundamental elements created with Archicad. Among these elements there were pillars, skylights, gabled roofs and curtain walls.
This problem generated real discontinuity points in the model that did not allow the program to recognize the enclosed spaces. This way, the areas and volumes needed for energy analysis could not be automatically identified.
To make the energy analysis program more manageable, we intervened, through a collaboration with Minnucci Associati, on the Graphisoft fil, and more simplified versions were generated with the aim of creating an MVD that generated a lighter file faithfully representing the reality. The simplified model contained only the data needed for energy analysis that the energy software could correctly display and manage.
Finally, the IFC file, generated by the simplification of the initial file, was enriched with all the essential elements to carry out an energy analysis. However, not all the interoperability problems were solved.
In fact, although I uploaded all the stratigraphic information of the opaque walls, transparent walls, and horizontal surfaces into the Archicad source file, only a few elements were recognized in Termolog and Termus. For example, the opaque walls appeared as such, while other walls appeared as they were in the software library. Therefore, I had to insert the features needed to perform the correct energy analysis again. Once the elements were created in the software library, the replacements of the default elements with the real ones were immediate. It was necessary to recreate the elements from scratch even for transparent surfaces given to importing problems.
The reverse process had interoperability problems too. The elements created by energy software could not be read by the software that created the BIM model.
Despite these interoperability problems, the availability of the source file generated by Minnucci Associati, reliable and precise, has allowed an accurate energy analysis, giving me the possibility of creating numerous simulations without difficulty. This, allowed to compare the different technological solutions in order to find the most economical and comfortable solution for users. In particular, it was possible to examine the actual benefits of installing an external thermal coat and the replacement of transparent elements with more performing elements with thermal cut and double glazing.
The possibility of analyzing the different solutions quickly has also allowed to evaluate different materials for the insulation of walls and ceilings.
In particular, for the ceilings, different solutions were examined thanks to the immediate availability of all geometric data. In the end, it was selected a wood fiber panel, as it is particularly performing during summer, which, in Naples, is the most energy-intensive season.
The chosen solution has other advantages: 1) There is no need to remove the damaged bitumen already in place, which would have a high disposal cost. 2) It creates a cavity for the natural ventilation of the roof. 3) The attacks for anchoring the photovoltaic panels are already present. Therefore, I was able to include this information as well, showcasing how the chosen solution was the best one from the economic and energy point of view.
In conclusion, the ability to use the shared models and to work on the geometric model without having to manually enter all the data in the energy simulation software was essential to reach a high quality result. The ability to easily evaluate the different technological solutions and to find the best energy performance and economic value has allowed me to complete my thesis in a timely manner and Maestri di strada will be able to use the model for multiple purposes defined during the meetings with the different experts group participating to the initiative.
Benefits from using openBIM
The project objectives are to use OpenBIM software through all the life of the building. Some of the uses have already been implemented while others are still in progress.
One of the main advantages of using openBIM for the project was the possibility to share the IFC file among different professionals belonging to different companies using different software. In particular:
ACCA software offered the USBIM Common Data Environment,
Tamburry Srl shared the point of cloud produced with the laser scanner
Minnucci Associati developed the 3D model with Graphisoft
ETS used the model to set up the onsite campaign to verify the vulnerability of the structure
Global Power Service S.p.A used the 3D model produced by the structural engineer to verify the possibility to install a photovoltaic plan, offered by ENEA, on the roof of the building.
ATR GROUP Air Conditioning is using now the model to propose a 3generation HAVC plant
Maestri di strada has used the visualization of the model, in the ACCA CDE platform, to define the requirements for the different zone of the building for the different activities so that I could consider them in the TERMUS software.
Myself added to the IFC model, information related to the stratigraphy of walls and roof and transmittance to be used in the TERMUS software
Besides, for my thesis, I verified the interoperability of 3 different software for energy analysis and the IFC file derived by Graphisoft. The problems I faced were:
- Termolog, that is one of the most used software in Italy for energy analysis, was unable to read the IFC files so I had to extract DVG files from IFC and then add some parameters by hand in order to perform the analysis
- TERMUS, that is a software produced by ACCA software, could import without problem the IFC files but again I had to add some information by hand.
- CYPETHERM, the software by Cype, had some problem to read IFC 2*3 while it could read IFC 4 but the student license I had would not me allow to produce IFC4
Anyway, my work was made easier by the use of IFC files as I am and energy engineer and I had never modelled. The use of authoring system to include information didn’t occur a much effort.
All the above enterprises and professionals could provide their contributes, without moving from their office except of course for the point of cloud and the structural survey.
The possibility to share IFC files during the COVID 19 block down, was essential as the design of the refurbishment could continue on distance.
The further development of the project foreseen the use of the model for the evaluation of time and cost and, after the refurbishment, the use of BIM for operational and management
BIM Uses were defined on the project
I agree to be contacted about the project BIM uses outside of this awards program.
Stakeholders
IBIMI, Anguillara Sabazia, Italy,
https://www.ibimi.it/, Sponsor, Anna Moreno
Maestri di Strada, Napoli,,
http://www.maestridistrada.it/, final users, Alessia Petrilli
