Development of a Tool for the Identification and Energy Analysis of buildings’ envelopes of different Hospital Areas

Abstract

Hospital facilities are considered to be some of the buildings with the highest consumption per unit of floor area, due to the use of the functions performed in each hospital area and the need to ensure strict conditions for the habitability of its users. On the other hand, it has been detected that in the hospital network there are different construction systems in terms of the characteristics of the building envelope for the same hospital areas. This is due to the fact that they have been designed in different time contexts, responding to different criteria and regulations. In the current context, which leads to the need to provide energy efficiency solutions in a strategic way, this work provides a tool for the detection of the situations that present greater heat loss by the building envelopes. Thus, by applying the calculator developed to the same hospital area distributed in different buildings, an indicator of heat loss through the building envelope per unit of floor area is obtained. The results achieved make it possible to direct specific measures to the most critical situations, which will make it possible to save resources for building envelope refurbishment when implementing alternative energy strategies.