Cool roofs and cool pavements application in Acharnes, Greece

The continuously increasing urban temperature results to the well-known urban heat island phenomenon. Cool roofs and cool pavements are very promising mitigation techniques as they can be easily applied to new and existing buildings as well as urban spaces. In the present paper, the application of cool materials in the urban region of Acharnes municipality in Greece is described. Cool roofs in the form of ceiling tiles are installed on the rooftop of the municipality building while cool paving stones are used to replace conventional pavements. A series of monitoring activities are performed for the building and the urban region. Measurements of the outdoor meteorological conditions, the indoor thermal comfort of the case study building, the surface temperature of the roofs and pavements as well as thermal imaging are exploited for the analysis of the cool roofs and cool pavements' performance. Thermal models using EnergyPlus and Envi-met are developed for the analysis of the cool roofs and cool pavements respectively. The overall study showed that the application of cool roofs results to 17% reduction in the annual cooling demand for the case study building while the surface temperature of the urban pavements is reduced by almost 10 K.