simulations

Nowadays, the building sector faces many challenges on occupant and resource levels. Given many indoor environmental quality (IEQ) complaints collected by field surveys, the first challenge is to provide comfort improvements. The second challenge is to be able to do so without unjustifiably increasing energy costs. The main reason why buildings face such issues is the implementation of IEQ management systems that target the entire space – even unoccupied zones. This doesn’t guarantee comfort and wastes building resources.

The Renson One residential concept focusses on the building envelope and the mechanical installations to ensure a climate-adaptive and resilient design throughout the year. Passive, renewable and energy-efficient elements are combined to address the total indoor environment and energy consumption, based on integrated control mechanisms. The high potential of external shading and ventilative cooling was proved to limit overheating and cooling consumption. Adding manual control of the windows to the simulations is a challenge to better approach reality.  

Due to the negative effects of Particulate Matter exposure, more and more inexpensive optical aerosol spectrometers and photometers (low-cost PM sensors) are coming to the market, which are often used to monitor air quality. In addition to the low acquisition costs, these commercial PM sensors are characterized by low maintenance effort, which enable very high data availability in continuous operation. However, questions about the quality of the generated data often remain unanswered.

With increasing building airtightness, the design of an adequate ventilation system gains importance. The first generation of ventilation systems, based on continuous supply of the nominal airflow rate, are now being replaced by Demand Controlled Ventilation (DCV). These systems, often H2O and/or CO2 controlled, do not take into account the emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) to the indoor environment.

According to the 2016 Household Projections report, England’s housing stock could reach 28 million households by 2039 with approximately one fifth being new constructions. A significant proportion of these newly built dwellings may face a high risk of overheating as a result of the combined effects of climate change and more stringent building thermal efficiency standards, if not appropriately designed.

Combined heat, air, moisture and pollutant simulations (CHAMPS) at the building system level are essential for improving energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality. This paper discusses the technical challenges and possible solutions to the problem of coupling an envelope model (CHAMSBES) with a multizone/network model for inter-zonal air and pollutant transport. A representative multizone solver was written, which solves the coupled heat, air, moisture and pollutant transport equations.

The main objective of this paper is to establish a set of test cases for analytical verifications and intermodel comparisons of ground heat exchanger (GHX) models used in building simulation programs. Several test cases are suggested. They range from steady-state heat rejection in a single borehole to varying hourly loads with large yearly thermal imbalance in multiple borehole configurations.

Few studies focus on commercial low-rise buildings which are often characterized by low-cost constructions materials and weak energy performances. For these large volumes, the heat transfers with the roof and the ground are prevalent. In this article, we show how the analysis of heat transfers through both the roof and the ground can achieve their thermal performance. The roof design and its opening systems is a key factor of the thermal and lighting performance.

In France, starting January 1st, 2013, the energy performance regulation will impose an airtightness treatment for every new residential building. This translates into several tens if not hundreds of thousands of envelope airtightness measurements a year that will have to be performed. They will have to be performed by a certified operator and according to the NF EN 13829 standard. This ISO standard is being revised under the Vienna agreement to become an EN ISO standard.

In this paper, experiments and simulations for moisture buffering of the gypsum boards is described.The small chamber (4.62 m3) installed the gypsum board on the interior surface was used for theexperiments. This chamber was located in a climate chamber. The ambient condition of the smallchamber was controlled at constant temperature and humidity. In the experiment for the relationshipbetween moisture buffering and ventilation rate, three cases of ventilation rate, i.e. no ventilation, 1.01/h and 5.0 1/h, were investigated.