An international team of experts from Europe is preparing to enhance the energy efficiency of historic structures by minimizing the amount of energy lost through windows. Therefore, window refurbishments are a viable approach to reduce energy loss.
Waaghaus
People often make public buildings and homes more energy efficient, but they forget to take care of badly insulated historical sites from where energy gets lost. The researchers of the EU-funded project called Efficient energy for EU cultural heritage(3ENCULT) are looking to solve this problem.
The project’s researchers, as their first case study, chose to improve the windows of the Waaghaus, which is more than seven centuries old. The building, known as Public Weighing House, is situated in Bolzano, Italy.
The researchers found that the previous renovation of the windows in ancient structures was neither historically nor aesthetically correct. For this project, Waltraud Kofler-Engl, the building's curator, and Franz Freundorfer, the expert window designer, had carte blanche to formulate a new window design with energy-efficient feature to integrate well into the historic façade of the building. The new energy-efficient design is known as the SmartWin Historic Window. In February 2012, the first prototype of the SmartWin Historic Window was set up in the Waaghaus.
The project will run through 2012 and the 3ENCULT team will continue to improve its next prototype to meet the criteria of cost-efficiency and feasibility.
Researchers from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom are involved in the project.
Source: http://ec.europa.eu/index_en.htm