Cool Clay Tiles in Italian Residential Districts : Investigation of the Coupled Thermal-Energy and Environmental Effects

Passive strategies for environmental sustainability and energy reduction in the construction industry are becoming increasingly important in both the scientific community and the industry world. Particularly, cool roofs showed acknowledged contribution in cooling energy saving and reducing urban overheating phenomenon, such as urban heat island. Additionally, high albedo strategy has shown also promising benefits from a global scale perspective, by counteracting global warming measured by means of CO2eq emissions offset.In this view, the present research work combines experimental, numerical, and analytical analysis approaches with the purpose to estimate the environmental and energy impact of the application of cool clay tiles over the roof of a residential area with single family buildings located in central Italy, where a continuous monitoring setup has been operating since 2010.The multiscale and multipurpose investigation demonstrated a global year-round CO2 emissions compensation by more than 700 tons, of which the 15% is produced by the passive cooling contribution at building scale and the remaining part is produced by the climate mitigation technique.The work, therefore, showed that local energy saving strategies must be combined with larger scale models for performing an exhaustive environmental analysis