Ventilation is necessary to provide a good indoor air quality to occupants in office buildings but is however a major energy consumer. In that manner, ventilation in itself can contribute to much more than 50% of the energy consumption for heating in well insulated office buildings. Likewise, the general trend in standards to augment ventilation requirements would still increase its energy costs. Thus, it seems obvious that an intelligent control of ventilation in office building allows to obtain substantial reductions of energy consumption.
While the use of heat energy has decreased since the middle of the 1970's the use of electricity in the Swedish stock of commercial buildings has increased dramatically. In the average Swedish office building, roughly 30 % of all electricity is used for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning WAC). Another 30 % is used for lighting, 20 % for office machines, and about 20 % for other loads. In order to study the use of electricity in Swedish office buildings in detail, the Swedish Council for Building Research initiated four monitoring and bddiing simulation projects in 1989.
A naturally ventilated three level office building has been used to study basic stack ventilation configurations and the interaction between ventilation and the subsequent cooling of the building structure in summer. The research was performed in the framework of a European project on passive cooling of buildings and the objective was to validate simple ventilation algorithms and to give an experimental basis to design guidelines for night cooling techniques.
Login