Ricerc@Sapienza

Global and local climate change increases the occurrence and the magnitude of extreme phenomena, as urban heat island and heat waves. These phenomena seriously affect the quality of life in several aspects: society, health, environment; they also heavily affect the building sector, increasing the energy use for cooling and deteriorating the indoor thermal environment. This paper utilizes data from a continuous urban microclimatic monitoring over three years to quantify the impact of heat waves on the thermal quality of two reference residential buildings in the city of Rome, Italy.

The paper presents a procedure able to assess the resilience of an electrical network, as well as to identify remedial actions that allow the system operator to reduce the impact of a threat occurring in the network. Network topology, number of connected users and return time of the threat are inputs of the procedure. The network graph is visited using the Dulmage-Mendelsohn decomposition algorithm; relevant resilience indices are then calculated by evaluating impact and probability of interruptions.

Over the past years the concern of the international scientific community towards the study of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) phenomenon has been growing. Such issue is particularly important in cities as Rome, where it is possible to experience intense heat stress conditions especially when heat waves intensify this phenomenon. Therefore this study wants to examine different mitigation strategies of the urban microclimate by taking into consideration the campus of the Sapienza University of Rome.

While urban areas expand both in terms of population and built/paved surfaces, cities are facing growing challenges. In particular, the wellbeing and comfort of urban population is of primary importance, and has to be pursued together with other objectives, such as the reduction of energy consumptions and emissions. These issues are all related, since energy consumptions lead to higher emissions, which translate into higher temperatures in cities, thus reduced thermal comfort for pedestrians, and air quality deterioration.