VC

Despite a lot of Integrated Design Process guidelines and procedures have been developed in the last few years, more specific energy design procedures are needed to push the implementation of passive design techniques.

This article deals with summer comfort and room air distribution in low-energy housings. In such buildings, the efficient thermal insulation and air tightness make it crucial to efficiently dispose of the heat released by the internal gains. In this prospect, the comfort in a test room resulting from an integrated cooling and ventilation system is assessed both experimentally and numerically. The air is supplied into the room close to the ceiling through a wall-mounted diffuser of complex geometry composed of 12 lobed nozzles.

The energy consumption needed for establishing a good indoor climate in shopping centres is often very high due to high internal heat loads from lighting and equipment and from a high people density at certain time intervals. This heat surplus result in a need for cooling during most of the year, typically also during the winter, and often the needed cooling is provided by a mechanical ventilation system with integrated mechanical cooling.

Hybrid ventilation (HV), as a combination of automated natural ventilation (NV) and balanced mechanical ventilation (MV), provides opportunities to use the advantages of both ventilation systems during the seasons in order to reduce energy demand and at the same time obtain comfortable indoor climate.

BR10 requires that all new residential constructions should be built as low energy housing. In order to meet these requirements residential buildings must be equipped with far more complex technology, than conventional housing. This, for example, could be a combination of mechanical balanced ventilation, natural ventilation, heat pumps, solar heating, solar cells or automatic sunscreens.

The objective of this study was to develop a method for hourly calculation of the operating temperature in order to evaluate summer comfort in dwellings to help improve building design.

Sizing rules in residential ventilation standards lack uniformity in both methodology and resulting design flow rates. In order to investigate the best achievable performance of natural ventilation, exhaust and fully mechanical ventilation systems, this paper presents a multi-zone simulation based optimization study for both a detached dwelling.

Ensuring a proper indoor environment in the museum exhibition rooms requires, among others, the achievement and maintenance of the proper air change rate. It is important because of the minimum rate necessary to remove the excessive heat gains and moisture and energy demand for the ventilation purposes.

The thermal comfort of the residential building Home for Life is investigated with a particular focus on the strategies used to achieve good thermal comfort, and the role of solar shading and natural ventilation. Home for Life was completed in 2009 as one of six buildings in the Model Home 2020 project. It has very generous daylight conditions, and is designed to be energy neutral with a good indoor environment.

The monitoring of a demand controlled heat recovery ventilation system with ground heat exchange in a zero-energy building in Groenlo, The Netherlands, revealed interesting practical insights.