Outlines the fundamentals of insulation and airtightness, proper air quality, and ventilation. Presents details of design and construction for walls, roofs, foundations, windows, and air-vapour barriers, as well as discussions of ventilation systems, heating systems, appliances and methods of testing and evaluation. One of the appendices gives weather data for selected US and Canadian cities. Aims to be accessible to the interested layperson or homeowner.
Retrofitting of older buildings brings about a noticeable drop in air supply. Fireplaces in buildings need sufficient combustion air. Tight windows may cause insufficient air supply. Therefore an adequate combustion air flow for the fireplace may not be attained and poor combustion will take place. In this study data on length, tightness, etc of windows, doors and other openings in buildings of the last 30 years have been collected.
A new statistic for quantifying climate, Infiltration Degree-Days, is introduced. These serve the same function for infiltration and infiltration-related processes that standard degree-days have served for conduction and conduction-related p
This paper discusses the measurement of air infiltration rates and reports on measurements relating indoor and outdoor aerosol size distributions in the 0.01 to 1 micron size range.
Simulation of the thermal performance of a building to take account of uncontrolled infiltration shows that infiltrating air on a leakage path is efficiently warmed up, especially if infiltration flow rates are low. For allowable infiltration flow rates with respect to thermal comfort, (0.5 -0.7 dm3/sm), the heating is 25 - 60 per cent of the temperature difference between the outside and inside air. For the longest leakage path, the incoming air is even near to the room air temperature.
Infiltration models are used to simulate the rates of incoming and outgoing air flows for a building with known leakage under given weather and shielding conditions.
The amount of air infiltration in a building, for given weather data, depends on the leakage and its distribution on the building envelope. In simulations of 17 designs of multiunit, multistorey buildings in Berlin, based on a typical meteorological year we obtained a wide range of infiltration values that varied according to the floor plan, the number and location of wall openings and cracks and the flow resistance relationship between the inside and the exterior of the building.
Indoor air quality and air infiltration were measured in 16 low-energy Californian houses. Eleven houses had gas stoves: all had average infiltration rates of 0.5 h to the -1 or less, recent construction dates, low natural ventilation, and no mechanical ventilation.
The theoretical and experimental study of heat losses and energy consumption and its influence on the air quality in buildings has been undertaken by the Silesian Technical University since 1980. The heat consumption of buildings isinfluenced by the thermal insulation of buildings components, airtightness of these components and the types of ventilation systems. Simultaneously, the thermal comfort and also air quality is influenced by the modern building material and different types of buildings.
The normally used equation for calculation of infiltration flow rates into a house is a power law of which the exponent n is normally assumed to be 0.66 but sometimes values of 0.5 or even 1 can be seen in the literature. In this paper the constant n is calculated assuming a non fully developed infiltration flow. The constant n will for this assumption take values between 0.67 and 0.77 if the slots where the flow takes place are long enough to get a flow close to a developed one.
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