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Heritage Preservation in Museums – First Steps Towards an Optimization Toolbox

Zygmunt, Marcin / Roels, Staf / Bauwens, Geert

Europe has a very rich cultural heritage, which is visible in the large number of historical buildings and museums. Many of our museums are located in old, poorly insulated buildings making them energy-intensive to maintain the required boundary conditions for the valuable artifacts they house. Maintaining the desired indoor conditions and curbing the energy dependency of historical museums is therefore challenging.

This study presents the procedure allowing to examine the potential improvement of buildings housed/stored heritage. The examined case study, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts (KMSKB) museum, was assessed in terms of its energy efficiency and indoor climate management, considering collection preservation. More reasonable indoor climate control can be assessed by employing different levels of climate control, following e.g. climate classes provided by ASHRAE. The above-mentioned requires knowledge of the building dynamics to effectively perform necessary analyses. In these complex historical buildings, however, many uncertainties hinder the application of conventional techniques to optimize energy use while reaching desired targets of preventive conservation and indoor comfort. This paper presents a procedure for the identification of the historic building’s dynamics employing numerical techniques: correlation analysis, energy signature (ES) modeling, and grey-box models (GBM). This approach can be used for indoor climate control or energy consumption forecasting of the building, as well as to uncover and deploy short-term optimization for the existing infrastructure. This study is a part of the ongoing Climate2Preserv pilot project, intending to develop a toolbox applicable for the optimization of museums.