Belgium

Thermal comfort and sensation are important aspects 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/sensation 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.

The association between indoor air quality (IAQ) and sleep quality was investigated in this study. A total of 27 participants (14 males and 13 females, 20-33 yrs.) without any sleep disorders and chronic diseases were recruited and divided into two groups: a polysomnography (PSG) group and a non-PSG group. The IAQ was changed by opening or closing windows. There were two phases for the experiment and two nights in each phase including one adaptive night and one test night, and around one-week washout period between two phases.

The opening of windows can lead to high energy losses in wintertime, especially in nearly zero-energy buildings. But can reduce overheating significantly in summertime. Therefore, window use models have been created in the past to assess the energy use and thermal comfort in residential buildings. The models are mostly based on weather-variables. However, a recent study (Verbruggen, Janssens, et al. 2018) indicated that these models were not able to accurately predict the window use in wintertime. For that reason, an occupancy and activity based model was developed.

A ventilation performance report is mandatory for every new residential building in Flanders, for building permits issued since January, 1st 2016. This means that the features of the ventilation system as installed in the dwelling must be reported and that, in the EPB-report of the dwelling, these data must be used to justify the energy performance of the ventilation system. 

To enhance the properly functioning of the ventilation systems, a ventilation preliminary design has to be made before the physical building process is started. 

Within the ventilation principle of buildings, the outdoor air is considered as a source of fresh, "clean" air. Outdoor air quality monitoring by environmental agencies, academic research projects and a broad range of citizen science projects show that this is not always the case. Although the outdoor air quality in our cities already improved, the concentrations of certain pollutants, especially particulate matter and peak pollutions of ozone (and its precursors nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds), remain problematic.

Combustion appliances are used in many buildings to provide space heating and domestic hot water. These appliances emit smoke that contains pollutants that must be kept away from the ventilation air supply of the building, to limit their impact on the indoor air quality (IAQ). An efficient way to prevent those pollutants from entering the ventilation circuit is to place the chimney terminal above the top of the roof, as far as possible from the air supply openings.

With increasing building airtightness, the design of an adequate ventilation system gains importance. The first generation of ventilation systems, based on continuous supply of the nominal airflow rate, are now being replaced by Demand Controlled Ventilation (DCV). These systems, often H2O and/or CO2 controlled, do not take into account the emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) to the indoor environment.