Industrialised off-site building renovation VS traditional retrofit

The scientific work, recently published on the special issue of the Journal of Facade Design and Engineering, aims at analytically evaluating the building deep retrofit implemented with a traditional and an industrialized approach.

The economic competitiveness for deep retrofit actions between the industrialised off-site and the traditional on-site approaches are compared by using a comparative Life Cycle Costing (LCC) analysis. This assessment was based on a deep analysis of all renovation-related cost and timing processes, from design to operation and maintenance phases.

The retrofit interventions considered in this work, refer to an existing building in Italy undergoing a deep renovation. The building examined is the Italian demo case of the project INFINITE.

The results show that in 50 years, the two deep retrofit approaches are comparable in terms of investment costs, even if a gap of around -7% and +16% still exists. There is the possibility to reduce this gap with the market uptake of the technological solutions. In addition to that, the possibility to re-use some dismantled components in the industrialised scenario contribute in a relevant way to increase the final value of such an approach.

"Eurac’s team has followed the entire process from the definition of the methodology, through the primary data colletion and elaboration, until the modelling and results analysis. Valuable support was given by the INFINITE partners, especially in providing costs data" explains researcher Martino Gubert talking about the role of Eurac Research and the support of the research partners in the entire work."The added value of this paper to the scientific community is the definition of a first costs analysis along the whole life cycle between the two approaches, while keeping the same level of performances" says Gubert.

There is still a lot to do in order to reduce the cost share of the industrialised solutions, first of all the reduction of the material costs. However, the operation and maintenance phase has shown to be key to transforming the expected higher quality of the industrialised components into a prolonged life expectance.

Read the original scientific article here