DEMO RENVELOPE – Circular building refurbishment of a regional vocational school in Knittelfeld
The ‘RENVELOPE - Energy Adaptive Shell’ concept is applied to a school building to show the potential of the solution in a prototypical school typology from the 1980s.
This is a demo project of the flagship project RENVELOPE.
The aim of “RENVELOPE – Energy Adaptive Shell” is to develop a cost-efficient, circular, all-in-one solution for upgrading the existing building stock by conditioning buildings from an outer shell. This is a paradigm shift from the traditional approach of locating HVAC equipment within the building. By combining serial, multifunctional CO2-neutral building renovation with integrated, intelligently controlled building technology and developing available thermal storage capacities in Austria’s existing stock, RENVELOPE will make the existing building stock an indispensable pillar for the energy system of the future.
The main goals of the project RENVELOPE:
- new business models and strategies for customer integration;
- an all-in-one solution for circular building renovation;
- a fully digitalised process for serial, multifunctional CO2-neutral building renovation by means of non-invasive, flexible and energy-active envelope elements enabling existing buildings to act as part of integrated energy systems;
To create a market for energy adaptive shells, the innovative solutions developed in RENVELOPE will be implemented in three large-scale demonstration buildings, that are exemplary for three large markets in the Austrian building sector.
Content and description of the demo project “Vocational school in Knittelfeld”:
The school for electrical systems, mechanical engineering and toolmaking is located in the western part of Knittelfeld. The unrenovated school building was built in 1981-83 as a reinforced concrete skeleton construction and fanned out with bricks. It was also structurally connected to the adjacent boarding school. The final energy demand of the building is 340 kWh/m²a.
The goal of the demo implementation with the RENVELOPE-solution is a complete retrofit system that is installed on the exterior of the building, consisting of modular panels that form a highly-insulated envelope. This envelope together with an efficient HVAC system will be demonstrated to reduce the energy demand of the building by over 80%. The amounts of energy that will be required by the school building will be provided by envelope integrated photovoltaics and heat pumps, therefore making it fully renewable. The focus of this project is a smart ventilation providing an improvement in indoor air quality while radiant heating and cooling provide optimal thermal comfort for the classrooms on the inside.
To the project website: https://renvelope.at/
