Towards more sustainable patterns of building design through ventilated rainscreens

Ventilated rainscreens are a very powerful tool for reducing whether winter or summer power consumptions, besides to procure effective defense from rain penetration. Moreover, if suitably designed and realized, they can determine façades not unlike that of the traditional Mediterranean habitat, continuous, plaster finished, jointless, which don’t have some of the flaws that have become typical of strongly isolated ETICS (in particular poor durability and moulds growth in cold and damp environment). Difficulty in the use of the ventilated rainscreens follows also from the difficulty of express their functioning in a physical-mathematical algorithm, which can allow you to optimize the choices regarding the factors that influence their behavior. Of these, the main ones are typology of the cladding (with open intermediate joints or not); height and depth of the cavity; presence inside of horizontal structures (which modify repeatedly the depth of the interspace); presence of wind and its angle of incidence. The Authors, through a research made as part of the activities of Constructions Technology Laboratory - La.Te.C. of Basilicata University (Potenza, Italy), developed a software, utilizable whether for opaque or windowed parts of the façades (Double Skin Façades), which allows you to easily design and optimize the ventilated rainscreens, thus adding another important step in the way for realizing more sustainable patterns of building design.