Urban Covered Courtyards in Mediterranean Climates : a method for optimizing environmental control strategy

Covering urban courtyards allows you to create interesting public or semi-public spaces, sheltered from bad weather and possibly with a controlled climate. In addition, the use of a transparent or semi-transparent roof allows you to take advantage of natural lighting. The use of this type of roof is a common solution in the countries of central and northern Europe, but difficult to apply in Mediterranean temperate climates, because it would cause overheating for a good part of the year. This unless appropriate solar control strategies. In this work, a case study was taken into consideration. It is the courtyard of a former Venetian convent. With reference to it, some types of partially transparent roofing and some solar control strategies were compared by means of computer simulations. The various solutions were compared from the point of view of visual and thermal comfort, as well as from that of primary energy demand for supplementary artificial lighting and possible energy demand for heating, ventilation and air conditioning if the relative system is present. Given the diffusion of this type of courtyards in the Italian territory, its thermal and luminous behavior has also been simulated in the warmer climate of Palermo. Simulation’s results show that the better solutions are those based on the use of dynamic solar control devices.