Towards Resilience and Sustainability for Historic Buildings: A Review of Envelope Retrofit Possibilities and a Discussion on Hygric Compatibility of Thermal Insulations

Abstract

Our historic heritage needs to be prepared to face the new challenges imposed by climate change. A possible way to meet this urgent need consists in improving buildings resilience and energy efficiency through envelope refurbishment interventions. Consequently, an overview of the existing solutions for envelope retrofits in historic buildings is provided and their suitability for preserving valuable constructions is discussed. Thermal insulation solutions appear as the most discussed interventions and, therefore, their compatibility is considered in detail, accounting the hygric point of view. First, a general, rough criterium is introduced for ranking their hygric behaviour, according to their vapour permeability and capillary absorption coefficient, through a comparison with the average hygric characteristics of some historic building materials. Then, a method for performing fast, preliminary compatibility assessment is proposed, based on the definition of target interventions (qualitative hygric requirements) for specific clusters of situations (type of intervention, component, boundary conditions). (c) 2019, (c) 2019 Taylor & Francis.