2nd Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 2CroCEE

Albania like many other countries in Eastern Europe, in the 1960s and 1970s responded to the growing demand for new homes by taking advantage of the emerging trend of industrialization of the building process and the large-scale construction of prefabricated residential buildings based on large prefabricated RC elements. During the 1970s large-panel buildings spread throughout the country and become the main type of construction in the Albanian cities such as Shkodër, Tirana, Durrës, Elbasan, Berat, etc. Most of these buildings have five or six stories and comprise different modules, the number of which depended on the urban project.
The construction technology of these types of buildings included only the construction of the building with prefabricated reinforced concrete material and did not take into account the energy performance of these structures. Since the moment of construction, only in the last year, several interventions have been made in different cities where a layer of polystyrene has been placed on top of these structures in order to thermally isolate these buildings.
The aim of this paper is to improve the energy performance of these buildings by making a comparison of the existing state as they are today and how their performance would be if innovative technologies and materials were applied. By means of thermal cameras in the city of Kamëz, which has been chosen as a key study, the existing state of the seismic performance of these buildings will be viewed, then using the MEEC program, comparisons will be made between the existing state and the proposed innovative material. The results may be used by municipalities of different cities, either where interventions have been made to improve their performance, or for municipalities that have not yet applied thermal insulation material to these types of objects.