Sustainable architecture and energy efficiency in a retrofitted museum

The Portuguese National Museum for Archaeology is undergoing an expansion and retrofitting. It is currently housed in one of the most important ancient monuments in Portugal: the Monastery of Jernimos. The authorities responsible for the museum, taking advantage of this retrofitting, decided to promote a modern and integrated design of the future archaeological museum. The architectural design aims to combine, aesthetically, the old and the new building, promoting sustainable architecture and energy efficiency (concerning, essentially, indoor climate, lighting and acoustical requirements). This paper presents the energy study of the future museum.It shows the modelling process, the thermal simulation results for sizing and optimising the HVAC system and also an economical analysis of several possibilities for providing heating and cooling to the museum power plant, including conventional and renewable sources of energy. The results show that, once the building shell is optimised and loads reduced, the conventional solutions for the power plant with state of the art equipment are still, in pure economic terms, more attractive than other less common alternative solutions.