buildings

The British Standard Code of Practice, and other authoritative guides, recommend minimum rates of ventilation related to the size and use of rooms, and structural means for providing them. But the difficulty of measuring actual ventilation rates suggests that it is seldom done.

This research investigates the significance of the moisture buffering and latent heat capacities in exposed cross-laminated timber (CLT) walls with the respect to indoor climate and energy consumption. Hygroscopic materials have the ability to accumulate and release moisture due to change in the surrounding humidity. The moisture buffer capacity is regarded as this ability to moderate, or buffer, the indoor humidity variations. Latent heat refers to the heat of sorption due to the phase change from vapour to bound water in the material and the other way around.

Green building has come to be a goal of building design now. Since sustainable performance of building involves lots of aspects, an integrated index is needed to evaluate it comprehensively. Building environmental impact assessment (EIA) based on life  cycle assessment (LCA) theory is a well-known method to do this.

The need to improve the energy performance of buildings, both new but also, and in particular, existing ones, is more imperative than ever. The “traditional” approach of thermal insulation is quite satisfactory for the reduction of thermal heating losses and loads, but it is not enough for coping with the problem of increased cooling loads, that are evolving to the single most influential problem, mainly for buildings in the densely built urban environment in Mediterranean and Southern European countries. 

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the impact of urban wind environments when assessing the availability of natural ventilation. A numerical study of urban airflow for a complex of five building blocks located at the University of Reading, UK is presented. The computational fluid dynamics software package ANSYS was used to simulate six typical cases of urban wind environments and to assess the potential for natural ventilation. The study highlights the impact of three typical architectural forms (street canyons, semi-enclosures and courtyards) on the local wind environment.

Currently, houses do not perform optimally or even as many codes and forecasts predict, largely because they are field assembled and there is no consistent process to identify deficiencies or to correct them. Solving this problem requires field performance evaluations using appropriate and agreed upon procedures in the form of a new process called residential commissioning. The purpose of this project is to develop and document these procedures and to demonstrate the value that applying them could provide in both new and existing California houses.

According to the recommendations of the ICRP and the German Commission on RadiologicalProtection, areas should be identified where increased radon concentrations in buildings occur morefrequently than on the country-wide average. Such regions are characterized by an increased radonpotential of the building ground. The highest indoor concentrations were measured in old houses ofgranitic ground and in mining regions.The identification of such areas in the first step is based on a small-scale investigation of the geogenicradon potential.

This paper presents a conceptual design of a Performance Benchmarking System (PBS)for buildings called Buildings PBS, which aims to create an online knowledge-basedsystem for the life-cycle performance assessment of buildings. The research presented inthis paper is based on the concern that the performances of buildings are vital for bothwell-being and energy saving throughout their life-cycle. In order to achieve theBuildings PBS, this paper describes several research essentials such as the methodology,the deliverables, and the demonstration.

The European Commission has mandated CEN to produce a set of standards to support MemberStates for the national implementation of the EPBD. This paper focuses on one of these standards,EN ISO 13790, "Energy performance of buildings - Calculation of energy use for space heating andcooling". It describes the history of this standard which started with a simplified calculation of the energyuse for heating of residential buildings only.

The International Organization for standardization (ISO), Technical Committee 163 "ThermalPerformance and Energy Use in the Built Environment" (ISO/TC 163) has produced and will producesets of standards by reference to which performance requirements can be expressed at various levels,from materials to complete buildings. A coherent set of new work items concerning the energyperformance of buildings has been launched in April 2007 which are briefly presented in this paper.