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In recent years, there has been growing concern regarding energy efficiency in the building sector with energy requirements increasing worldwide and now responsible for about 40% of final energy consumption in Europe. Previous research has shown that ventilated façades help to reduce energy use when cooling buildings in hot and temperate climates. Of the different ventilated façade configurations reported in the literature, the configuration of ventilated façade with window rarely has been studied, and its 3D thermodynamic behavior is deserving of further analysis and modeling. This paper examines the thermal behavior of an opaque ventilated façade with a window, in experimentally and numerical terms and its impact in energy savings to get indoor comfort. Field measurements were conducted during the winter, spring and summer seasons of 2021 using outdoor full scale test cells located in Seville (southern Spain). The modeling of the ventilated façade was carried out using a three-dimensional approach taking into account the 3D behavior of the air flow in the air cavity due to the presence of the window. The validation and comparison process using experimental data showed that the proposed model provided good results from quantitative and qualitative point of view. The reduction of the heat flux was assessed by comparing the energy performance of a ventilated façade with that of an unventilated façade. Both experimental and numerical results showed that the ventilated façade provided a reduction in annual total energy consumption when compared to the unventilated façade, being compensated the winter energy penalization by the summer energy savings. This reduction is about 21 % for the whole typical climatic year showing the ability of the opaque ventilated façade studied to reduce energy consumption to insure indoor comfort, making its suitable for use in retrofitting the energy-obsolete building stock built in Spain in the middle decades of the 20 century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing interest in reducing the energy consumption in buildings and in improving their energy efficiency. Building retrofitting is the employed solution for enhancing the energy efficiency in existing buildings. However, the actual performance after retrofitting should be analysed to check the effectiveness of the energy conservation measures. The aim of this work was to detect and to quantify the impact that a retrofitting had in the electrical consumption, heating demands, lighting and temperatures of a building located in the north of Spain. The methodology employed is the application of Functional Data Analyses (FDA) in comparison with classic mathematical techniques such as the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The methods that are commonly used for assessing building refurbishment are based on vectorial approaches. The novelty of this work is the application of FDA for assessing the energy performance of renovated buildings. The study proves that more accurate and realistic results are obtained working with correlated datasets than with independently distributed observations of classical methods. Moreover, the electrical savings reached values of more than 70% and the heating demands were reduced more than 15% for all floors in the building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]