The EU project that promotes innovation in the building sector
The H2020 project MEZeroE (Measuring Envelope products and systems contributing to next generation of healthy nearly Zero Energy Buildings – Grant Agreement n. 953157), coordinated for Politecnico di Milano by Graziano Salvalai, Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering, has officially kicked off with an on-line meeting on February 04th-05th 2020.
MEZeroE is a research project that has been funded by the European Commission within the H2020 Programme call “NMBP-05-2020 – Open Innovation Test Beds for functional materials for building envelopes”, whose aim is to support and promote innovation and standardisation in the building sector, contributing to the EU building stock transformation. Fragmentation and the complex structure of the building market are among the main barriers to technology innovation in this sector; in this context, MEZeroE offers an open innovation ecosystem for the development, testing and upscaling of smart and bio-based, human-centric envelope products, combining infrastructure facilities and expertise of academic and research centers, with innovative solutions proposed by industry to bring disruptive changes into the building market.
The MEZeroE Consortium represents a large portion of Europe, and the many partners can be clustered in 4 main categories: RTD, including research centers, universities and laboratories with important testing infrastructures and high awareness of the market needs for performance characterization and certification; IND, including innovation driven SMEs and bigger industry players; M&V, including three complementary very dynamic SMEs ready to share a common data platform with a unique API as access point; BIZ, including specialized SMEs enabling to develop, promote and exploit the MEZeroE open innovation platform as a multi-side virtual marketplace containing a demand/offer matching environment, as well as lot of contents to support innovation processes, knowledge transfer and performance-based product characterization.
Seven different pilot lines will be developed within the project, with the aim of characterizing the performance of different building envelope solutions. In this context, Politecnico di Milano will work on a specific pilot line, focusing on the characterization of multi-layer dry nZEB Enabler Envelope Solutions facing health and safety requirements. The development of this test-chain will lead to the construction, in the Polo Territoriale di Lecco, of a pilot plant – Building Energy Efficiency pilot – for the testing and analysis of innovative building envelope products and/or materials, especially in reference to their thermal, acoustic, photometric and comfort performances.
Find out more about H2020 MEZeroE project.