shading

Natural ventilation can be a part of a strategy for a good indoor air quality. It can also be a way to realise night time ventilation during warm periods. In this latter case, the aim is to cool down the thermal mass of the building to obtain a better thermal comfort during daytime. Night time ventilation requires high ventilation rates and sufficient accessible thermal mass. The ventilation openings have to be well designed to avoid undesirable effects like rain, pollution and burglary.

In designing and constructing its new R&D Centre, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) had two main aims: to provide a comfortable working environment and to conserve as much energy as possible. To achieve these aims, attention focused on the control of heating and lighting, especially in perimeter zones near glazed areas. The major features included ventilation windows with integral automatically controlled blinds, and daylight compensation lighting controls. Together, these have significantly reduced heating and lighting loads

The examination of the "Young-am House", a traditional folk house located in the middle region of the Korean peninsula, aims to analyze and to inform the bio-climatic design of the building and interior spaces based in the traditional architecture of Korea. As a consequence of the examination, it was evident that bioclimatic design performed an important part in creating a natural environment for comfortable living by taking consideration of the changing local climatic conditions.

Passive solar building are developed to take advantage of the solar heat to reduce the cost of heating. This is obtained by windows with large glass areas in the facade of the building. This idea has some disadvantages. The large window area gives large transmission losses and during warm periods of the year overheating can occur. These disadvantages can be overcome by adding extra window components to the building, like a shutter, shading devices and vent windows. In order to study the capabilities of the building and the various components a computer simulation is developed.

The constructive uses of vegetation in building engineering services are acoustic quieting, air molecular and particulate filtration, water filtration and chemical polishing, shading from solar gain, cooling and humidification. A water conservation regime should form part of the integrated solution.

Buildings with different mass levels were monitored in the summer of 1993 in Pala, South California, under different ventilation and shading conditions. The effect of mass in lowering the daytime (maximum) indoor temperatures, in closed and in night ventilated buildings, was thus evaluated. Night ventilation had only a very small effect on the indoor maxima of the low-mass building. However, it was very effective in lowering the indoor maximum temperatures for the high mass building below the outdoor maxima, especially during the 'heat wave' periods.

Comfort conditions in a warm/hot environment can be achieved by means of several cooling strategies ranging from the obvious sun shading to the less obvious radiant cooling. These strategies are identified and three selected computer models are evaluated in terms of their capability to cope with them. The result is that the most popular or sophisticated computer models available are not able to deal with passive cooling. Also the problem of is the interface between currently available computer models and their final users, the architects, is analyzed.