The brief for this university campus design required a low energy building for the business school and the education faculty, with a wide variety of room sizes and functions. The work included ensuring that the European Commission (Thermie programme) and the British Ministry for Energy DTI financed the low energy strategy. The energy strategy is based on a well-insulated building, a low energy ventilation system, passive solar energy gain, using direct daylight, using a building-integrated photovoltaic system. The buildings are very compact and well insulated.
Seven years after the groundbreaking Queen's Building, ventilation towers are back on the campus agenda with this passive solar library for Coventry University. How has the design moved forward?
Even when the hills have soaked up the rain and the lush green grass is bent flat in the wind, the Great Glasshouse in Wales can still offer a Mediterranean haven. But how do you create and service such an environment?
On the base of universally valid laws: energy conservation and the theorem of Fourier, the dynamic behavior of a room is traced back to only two most important parameters. With the aid of the so-called free-run temperature a generally valid strategy for low energy houses is deduced and its transfer to practice illustrated. With the climate surfaces, a planning tool is introduced allowing the strategic planning of low energy houses based on these two parameters. Finally the obsolescence of the passive-solar rules and strategies is demonstrated.
There has been a growing interest in the use of natural ventilation in buildings to supplement orreplace mechanical air supply systems. However, for buildings in busy urban areas the potentialto use natural ventilation can be limited by excessive noise entering through natural ventilationopenings such as windows and trickle ventilators. Such openings tend to have large open areasto enhance air flow while offering a very low resistance to the transmission of external urbannoise.
Research and development of new-type passive solar houses are the main purpose of this paper. The proposed passive solar houses haven an air circulation system in brick walls combined with passive heating and cooling systems. A prototype model house with a solar collector and Trombe walls was constructed and its thermal performance was measured to evaluate this new system. The efficiency on the real size model house with attached green houses is discussed through thermal performance simulations.
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