Resilient Cooling strategies: analysis and simulation of a case study

Resilient cooling of buildings is a problem related to climate changes, still not much studied in literature. It concerns the ability of the building-plant system, that includes also occupants, to withstand and recover after a perturbation. Several disturbances can cause the non-resiliency of the buildings, but in this work only heatwaves and power outages have been considered. A non-resilient building may not provide suitable indoor conditions to the occupants, causing a health risk. For this reason, this work, part of the Annex 80, aims to begin the analysis of a building-plant system, simulating the operation of a full-air HVAC system combined with an air to water heat pump in three climatic zones (i.e. warm, mild, cold climates) considering both the typical outdoor conditions and those with expected heatwaves in the mid-term future; with and without power outages. The results are interesting both in terms of energy consumption and in terms of operative temperatures because they allow to evaluate the ability of the system to ensure the required indoor comfort conditions and how energy consumption and HVAC system could change in the future. Further research will be done to consider other combination of HVAC generation and distribution systems possibly coupled with renewable energy sources to avoid the problems related to power outages.