Smart-retrofitting of existing buildings by predictive calculation of heating load using non-destructive testing

The construction sector is one of the most resource-intensive sectors and responsible for a considerable share of energy consumption & greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, the maintenance phase of a building’s lifecycle has become the focus of attention, as old buildings consume an enormous amount of energy and result in tremendous detrimental impacts on the environment. Recent advancements in building information modelling and simulating building energy performance have provided opportunities for energy optimization. While energy simulation can be applied as a tool to evaluate the energy performance of a building in operation, the emergence of BIM technology facilitates the evaluation process with predefined and enriched building information. Although with current sensor technologies existing buildings can be represented digitally, they fail to describe the structure of each building element separately. This paper proposes a methodology to detect and identify additional information of each building element required to perform reliable energy simulation. A new age portable radar is used to probe building elements and predict their thermal transmittance to in-turn optimize for heating energy by appropriately retrofitting the structures. The methodology is tested on prototype elements built to mimic existing buildings and the simulations are carried out on a commercially available building planning software