acoustics

Personalized Environmental Control Systems (PECS) with the functions of heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, and acoustics have the advantage of controlling the localized environment at occupant’s workstation by their preference instead of conditioning an entire space. This improves personal comfort, health of the occupants, and energy efficiency of the entire heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system substantially. Some of the major advantages and limitations of PECS are summarized. 

Heating energy in buildings represents a significant proportion of the total global energy consumption. Uncontrolled airflow through the building envelope contributes significantly to its energy losses.  

Within the Belgian Radon Programme the Belgian Building Research Institute is responsible for theinvestigation of techniques for prevention and mitigation of radon problems in dwellings. One of themost regular actions is the installation of a sub-slab depressurisation (SSD) system. As there are noready-to-use systems available on the Belgian market, a system has to be designed for every specificsituation.

DayMedia and MulCom are multimedia teaching packages targeted at architects and building engineers, as well as students. While DayMedia is concerned with daylighting in architecture, MulCom covers human comfort and the energy performance of buildings. Most of the content is related to thermal comfort, although acoustics and visual comfort are covered as well. The development of the packages has part-funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the Low Energy Architecture Research Unit (LEARN) of the University of North London.

Confronting the high density of town planning, architects and towr1 planners are led to design mall outdoor places which are inserted into the city but offer specified properties: serenity, calmness, unusual surrounding ... Within the framework of the CERMA laboratory, we are looking for reference architectural examples likely to meet such needs and transposable into a contemporary architectural project.