A road tunnel is an enclosed and covered infrastructure for the vehicular traffic. Its lighting system provides 24 h of artificial sources only, with a higher amount of electric power used during the day. Due to safety reasons, when there is natural lighting outside the tunnel, the lighting levels in the stretches right after the entrance and before the exit must be high, in order to guide the driver’s eye towards the middle of the tunnel where the luminance must guarantee safe driving, avoid any over-dimensioning of the lighting systems, and produce energy savings. Such effects can be reached not only through the technological advances in the field of artificial lighting sources with high luminous efficiency, but also through new materials for road paving characterized by a higher reflection coefficient than other ordinary asphalts. This case study examines different technical scenarios, analyzing and comparing possible energy and economic savings. Traditional solutions are thus compared with scenarios suggesting the solutions previously mentioned. Special asphalts are interesting from an economic point of view, whereas the high costs of LED sources nowadays represent an obstacle for their implementation.

The European Union is working on strategies in order to increase the energy efficiency of buildings. A useful solution is to identify the energy performance of buildings through the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), as it provides information for the comparison of buildings with different architectural typology, shape, design technology and geographic location. However, this tool does not assess the real energy consumption of the building and does not always take into account its impact on the environment. In this work, two different types of analysis were carried out: one based only on the energy efficiency and the other one based on the environmental impact. Those analyses were applied on a standard building, set in three different Italian locations, with the purpose of obtaining cross-related information. After the evaluation of the results, interventions on some parameters (walls insulation, windows frame, filler gas in the insulated glazing) have been identified in order to improve the energy behavior of the building with an acceptable environmental impact. The aim of this paper is to propose a methodology that integrates the EPC with green building rating systems, leading to a more conscious choice of retrofit interventions as a compromise between energy performances and environmental impact.

The goal set by the EU of quasi-zero energy buildings is not easy to reach for a country like Italy, as it holds a wide number of UNESCO sites and most of them are entire historical old towns. This paper focuses on the problem of the improvement of energy performance of historical Italian architecture through simple interventions that respect the building without changing its shape and structure. The work starts from an energy analysis of a building located in the historic center of Tivoli, a town close to Rome. The analysis follows the recommendations of the UNI TS 11300-Part1, which indicates how to evaluate the energy consumptions. The calculations were performed only on the building envelope, based on passive solutions and alternatives. Four passive strategies were examined and applied based on the location of the building and the non-alteration of the structure and the landscape. The obtained results impacted positively on the energy performance of the building: the annual energy saving reached a maximum value of 25%. This work shows how it is possible to improve the energy performance of an existing building achieving a significant energy saving with the respect of the building architecture, shape, function and the surrounding landscape.

The smart and resilient city evolves by slow procedures of mutation without radical changes, increasing the livability of its territory. The value of the city center in a Smart City can increase through urban lighting systems: its elements on the territory can collect and convey data to increase services to city users; the electrical system becomes the so-called Smart Grid. This paper presents a study of smart lighting for a small town, a touristic location inside a nature reserve on the Italian coast. Three different approaches have been proposed, from minimal to more invasive interventions, and their effect on the territory has been investigated. Based on street typology and its surroundings, the work analyzes the opportunity to introduce smart and useful services for the citizens starting from a retrofitting intervention. Smart city capabilities are examined, showing how it is possible to provide new services to the cities through ICT (Information and Communication Technology) without deep changes and simplifying the control of basic city functions. The results evidence an important impact on annual energy costs, suggesting smart grid planning not only for metropolis applications, but also in smaller towns, such as the examined one.

Pedestrian areas use lighting systems with output at the mesopic level, which is situated between the photopic and scotopic. Studies have shown surrounding luminance effect on peripheral vision and its magnitude of the effect is larger than that of the foveal luminance. This study aims to examine this proposed model using real night time lighting conditions experienced by pedestrians in dark and narrow alleys and pathways close to water ways in the city of Venice. The eye tracking system and luminance scanning are used to measure such conditions while walking at night. The pedestrians' eye gaze angle data under non uniform background luminance show that peripheral luminance affect pedestrians' adaptation field differently given the pathways' geometry. Luminance adaptation data under mesopic lighting conditions contributes to the lighting system design while meeting the requirements with recommended practice for safe walkway lighting design.

The periodic stabilized regime is the condition where the temperature of each point of a certain environment varies following a periodic law. This phenomenon occurs in many practical applications, such as passive or ancient buildings not equipped with Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning HVAC systems and located in latitudes where the temperature greatly varies with Earth’s daily cycles. Despite that, the study of transient phenomena is often simplified, i.e., considering negligible the thermal response of the indoor microclimate. An exact solution to enclosures whose microclimate is free to evolve under a periodic stabilized regime does not exist nowadays, also from an analytical point of view. The aim of this study is to parametrically analyze the thermal variations inside a room when a transient periodic temperature is applied on one side. The phenomenon has been numerically studied through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and analytically validated using a function that reproduces the daily variation of the outdoor temperature. The results of this research would lay the groundwork to develop analytical correlations to solve and predict the thermal behavior of environments subject to a periodic stabilized regime.