Strategies for improving energy of the historic masonries of the minor centres of Abruzzo Region

The hinterland of Abruzzo Region, in Italy, is constellated by small historical towns between the hills and valleys or perched upon the mountains. These minor historical centres characterize the territory in a very determining way thanks to the fact that they completely blend into it; these centres represent the region's social and cultural heritage, for the presence of historical, environmental and spatial values, so their loss would be a loss for the society as a whole The earthquake that 6 April, 2009, that struck the Abruzzo region has aggravated the previous state of deterioration and abandonment of its internal centres and it caused the destruction of many of them, resulting in conditions of severe damage and, in numerous cases, the loss of the urban fabric. The need to recovery the buildings damaged by the 2009 earthquake turned into a series of interventions aiming not only at reconstructing the existing buildings and achieving their structural safety, but also at increasing their energy performance levels. In fact both the processes of analysis and rehabilitation of the built heritage have significantly changed since climate plays a fundamental role in them. For this reason, one of the main goals of each kind of intervention is to improve also the environmental comfort standards. The study of the state of the art has highlighted that solutions that could be actually compatible and reliable were not easy to identify. In fact there is not enough data in literature regarding the thermal transmittance of historic masonry buildings that are the prevailing building type in the investigated area and are composed of non-homogenous and non-isotropic layers. Therefore there's been the need to codify a model for experimental investigations in order to base on which the promotion of energy efficiency and comfort. The investigation method is carried out through a series of on-site thermal measurements, by using both indirect and qualitative methods such as thermography, and direct and quantitative methods such as tests by means of a thermo-flux-meter. These in-depth studies have highlighted the actual behavior of the different types of vertical enclosures of the buildings and helped to gather basic information about the actual thermal behavior of the building elements. Thanks to the information obtained, after the classification of a set of compatible design strategies with the historical and architectural values found, it was possible to verify the actual energy behavior of the solutions envisaged depending on the level of invasiveness / reversibility of each of these solutions. The methodology briefly described has been applied on the historic walls of a minor centres of Abruzzo Region.