Design, construction, and operation of a novel Open Innovation Test Bed for real-life performance assessment of multilayer building envelope solutions

The building market has recently seen new compelling opportunities in the field of off-site construction and in particular dry-assembly envelope systems, thanks to their advantages. The system, based on the mechanical assembly of materials on a resistant structure, offers high energy performance and superior acoustic and thermal comfort. Nevertheless, the current market highlighted the need for an holistic approach to implement such energy-efficient technologies involving research centers and university with their Living Labs for performance validation. The present work, funded within the MEZeroE Horizon 2020 project, discusses the creation of a unique ecosystem that can accelerate the transition of open innovations, towards the development of Open Innovation Test Beds (OITBs) for testing and upscaling standard and pioneering envelope solutions. The MEZeroE ecosystem brings together different testbeds and in this manuscript, one OITB, the BEE Lab experimental facilities, is presented and validated by first functioning and results analysis. In that context, the paper has a twofold objective. Firstly, it elaborates on the design and development of a novel living Lab (LL) space for the performance assessment in real conditions of full-scale multilayer envelope solutions and secondly, it discusses the results of an applied thermo-hygrometricexperimental analysis to confirm that the test bed works as intended. Aside from the experimental results, what makes the approach innovative is the creation of a network of OITBs across Europe and the definition of a unique online network to accelerate the building decarbonization.