Indoor climate management on cultural heritage buildings: Climate control strategies, cultural heritage management and hygrothermal rehabilitation

Abstract

Cultural heritage plays a major role in modern societies as a symbol of their past and as a way to safe keep their identity for future generation. Its protection and conservation are a challenge to ensure the cultural diversity in a continuously changing world. Heritage buildings such as palaces, churches or monasteries are often used to display collections trying to combine the patrimonial and architectural value of the building with the artistic interest of the collections. This combination of interests, while returning some buildings back to society, may also pose some risk to their conservation due to pressures caused by high visitor flows and high levels of climate control. Nowadays, one of the greatest challenges for the cultural heritage is to achieve a compromise between conservation, sustainability and comfort. However, this balance has been difficult to achieve, since conservation and comfort require tight climate control, which is difficult to achieve in historic buildings with large volumes and high thermal transmittance. This thesis aims to cover a wide range of situations that interfere with the indoor climate of the heritage, namely at the level of its monitoring and analysis, risk-analysis, discussion of the various climate control strategies and the capacity of buildings to comply with them. The impact of the visitors on the conservation and the influence of the envelope in the energetic rehabilitation were also investigated. Methods of statistical analysis and risk quantification, a climate control strategy and an energy optimization methodology were proposed. The use of the climatic data from the Jeronimos Monastery (MJ), the church of São Cristóvão and National Museum of Ancient Art (NMAA) and the use of a simulation model of the MJ allowed to conclude the difficulty of the heritage buildings to comply with tight climate ranges. A high potential for reducing energy consumption was achieved through the application of dynamic climate control strategies without jeopardizing the conservation, and a new methodology was proposed and validated. The use of the MJ simulation model allowed to conclude that the current number of visitors already raises conservation risks and that, even in the most pragmatic scenario, it will contribute to the degradation of the air quality by 2027. The simulation of a generic room of the NMAA for 15 European cities has made it possible to conclude that it is not possible to standardize the rehabilitation solutions since energy needs depend on the location. Finally, it was concluded that the focus on climate control strategies has a great potential for cost reduction and that in temperate climates of the southern Europe the improvement of thermal transmittance has a reduced effect on the building’s response