Performance monitoring of refurbished buildings through innovative precast concrete modules

The existing reinforced concrete (RC) buildings, built throughout the 20{th} century, present inadequate insulating characteristics that make them vulnerable to climate changes. Moreover, the actual construction canons, which take into account the buildings seismic safety, underline the incompatibility and the risk these structures run and the importance to monitor their performance over time. The building refurbishment by using innovative precast concrete panels integrated with detecting sensors improves the building's performance and makes possible its real time monitoring. This paper proposes the first steps of the innovative methodological approach to develop an information system that allows acquiring and processing data for the refurbished RC buildings monitoring. The Information System consists of a computer platform (named Performance Detecting Platform-PDP), a transmission box used for the data collection and transmission with cloud computing system, and the sensors embedded into the panels dedicated to the data acquisition through Internet of Things (IoT) support. This tool allows recording and reporting energy and position data that the PDP processes in order to monitor the performance trend and to alarm in case of building deficiencies.