Assessment Methodologies For The Combined Seismic And Energy Retrofit Of Existing Buildings PDF Download

This technical report presents the study carried out within the Action 3 'Methodologies for assessing the combined effect of upgrading' of REEBUILD project, introducing a simplified integrated method for the assessment of the combined seismic and energy retrofit of existing buildings, along with their environmental performance, in a life-cycle perspective by achieving a global assessment result in economic terms. The development of a user-friendly method to assess the potential improvements achieved in a combined renovation project is essential to ease and speed up the knowledge of benefits that different stakeholders e.g. owners, industry, policy makers, etc., can gain by combining seismic safety and energy efficiency retrofit technologies, thus overcoming renovation barriers, such as intervention cost, execution time, inhabitants' relocation, institutional and administrative issues. A review of the existing methodologies for the seismic and energy retrofit assessment of existing buildings is first carried out, serving as a state-of-the-art for proposing the simplified combined assessment method. Specifically, two key-streams of available methods and tools are investigated: (i) sector-specific methods, focusing on methods and tools devoted to the independent assessment of either seismic or environmental/energy performance of buildings, and (ii) multi-performance methods, including sustainability assessment methods and tools, mainly focused on qualitative procedures (i.e. sustainability rating systems based on indicators of different weight), and integrated methodologies developed in the last years to provide a quantitative holistic life cycle-based assessment. Within the latter category of the analysed existing assessment methods, the Sustainable Structural Design (SDD) methodology, developed in the framework of the SAFESUST (SAFEty and SUSTainability) approach results particularly noteworthy. Hence, it is considered as point of reference to introduce a simplified combined assessment method, consisting of four main steps, namely (i) input information, (ii) selection of techniques, (iii) integrated retrofit design and evaluation, and (iv) optimised solutions. Finally, four case studies referring to EU representative residential and non-residential building typologies needing combined seismic and energy retrofit are identified in order to apply both the selected standard (i.e. SSD methodology) and the proposed simplified combined assessment method.