Super-insulated wooden envelopes in Mediterranean climate: Summer overheating, thermal comfort optimization, environmental impact on an Italian case study

The aim of the study is to verify the actual performance of a super-insulated wooden envelope in aresidential building located in a hot dry summer temperate climate and to optimize its thermal behaviorfavoring a dynamic interaction with the indoor environment.The method involved an integrated strategy between monitoring and calibrated simulations on exper-imental data and the simultaneous analysis of several aspects such as energy performance (EnergyPlussoftware), comfort (dynamic analysis with Fanger’s PMV comfort model) and environmental-economicsustainability (LCA analysis with SimaPro software). Parametric analyses were carried out to generalizethe results to various usage patterns of plants and passive cooling techniques and to several climatezones.The study highlighted the presence of overheating phenomena and demonstrated that this problemcan be solved or reduced through the adoption of appropriate passive strategies, such as massive innerlinings combined with natural or hybrid ventilation.Appropriate values of internal areal heat capacity and decrement factor will configure comfortable andenergy efficient solutions.In temperate climates the optimal solution, namely the adoption of a 12 cm thick solid brick (or dou-ble dry clay panel) and natural ventilation, reduces the discomfort levels of 30–50%. In hottest periodsof extreme climates the best solution, namely CMV + free-cooling combined with internal lightweightplaster, only slightly reduces the overheating with a 6% reduction of discomfort.