PR2017

The polyurethane foam industry is projected to reach a worldwide value of up to $74bn by 2022 and with airtightness of new and retrofitted properties continually increasing, an important question arises: what is the impact of these materials on the indoor air quality (IAQ), occupants’ health and indoor environment?

We introduce a new method for defining ventilative cooling potential (VCP) for office buildings that depends not only on the climatic conditions but also on building thermal characteristics. The energy savings from ventilative cooling differs from building to building; therefore, VCP should be able to represent the actual energy savings—though not perfectly—in order to guide optimization of ventilative cooling parameters during the initial design stage.

Thermal comfort is an important aspect of the building design and indoor climate control as modern man spends most of the day indoors. Conventional indoor climate design and control approaches are based on static thermal comfort models that views the building occupants as passive recipients of their thermal environment. Assuming that people have relatively constant range of biological comfort requirements, and that the indoor environmental variables should be controlled to conform to that constant range.

Flow interaction between thermal plumes and vertical air distribution and the resulting airflow structures were investigated under increasing heat load conditions. The main objective was to investigate the large-scale flow patterns, airflow fluctuation and frequency of the flow field. The flow interaction between thermal plumes and ventilation provides random flow motion and vortical structures that further effect the airflow characteristics such as velocity and temperature fields, turbulence intensity and frequency of the fluctuations.

According to the 2016 Household Projections report, England’s housing stock could reach 28 million households by 2039 with approximately one fifth being new constructions. A significant proportion of these newly built dwellings may face a high risk of overheating as a result of the combined effects of climate change and more stringent building thermal efficiency standards, if not appropriately designed.

The effectiveness of night ventilation strategy for residential buildings in the old town of Ghadames has been investigated in this study. Methods of field surveys including observations, temperature measurements and interviews were conducted to determine the characteristic building parameters and strategies including window patterns and space organisation that mostly contributed to achieve an efficient indoor comfort conditions especially at night summer time. Results showed that skylight openings can be a good window pattern for enhancing night ventilation in hot arid climate.

In Korea, a large amount of fine dust and carbonyl compounds is generated during cooking in the kitchen. The purpose of this study is to select 20 apartment houses and measure contaminants that are generated during cooking in apartment houses in Korea. The measurement result showed that 15 out of 20 apartment houses exceeded the guidelines for PM10 based on its peak concentration. The concentration of carbonyl compounds was measured in the descending order of acrolein (270.0㎍/m3), formaldehyde (239.5㎍/m3) based on its average concentration.

The Royal Wanganui Opera House (RWOH), in Whanganui, New Zealand, was constructed in 1899, and now seats 830 people. This building was designed with a natural ventilation system; however, this system is no longer in operation and the RWOH has received regular complaints from patrons regarding indoor thermal comfort. Various options for mechanical systems to improve indoor comfort during summer performances have been considered, but have been deemed too costly. The RWOH is listed with Heritage New Zealand as a Category 1 heritage building.

Mechanical ventilation has become a mandatory requirement in multiple European standards addressing indoor air quality (IAQ) and ventilation in residential dwellings (single family houses and low-rise apartment buildings). This article presents the state of the art study through a review of the existing literature, to establish a link between ventilation rate and key indoor air pollutants. Design characteristics of a mechanical ventilation system such as supply/exhaust air flow, system and design of supply and exhaust outlets were considered.

The Spanish Technical Building Code establishes the criteria for indoor air quality fixing minimum and constant ventilation rates per local. Currently, there is a proposal to modify the regulations so that the IAQ criteria becomes more useful by setting it based on average concentrations of CO2 and accumulated CO2 in the habitable rooms. However, the indoor average concentration is not the average concentration at which the occupants are exposed.