sustainability

Ventilative cooling is a free cooling methodology, harnessing the cooling potential of the outdoor air to remove excess heat, without the use of thermodynamic process, thereby saving valuable cooling energy in buildings. In future zero energy buildings it is essential to lower the energy consumption for cooling and here ventilative cooling is one good option.

Open offices, where more than one person works, have been used frequently in recent years. However, there are many studies on the efficiency of the indoor air quality of the employees in these offices. It has also been shown that the risk of cross-contamination is higher in such offices during the COVID period, but this risk can be reduced by increasing the amount of fresh air.

The Proceedings of the 40th AIVC - 8th TightVent - 6th venticool Conference: "From energy crisis to sustainable indoor climate - 40 years of AIVC" held in Ghent, Belgium on 15-16 October 2019.

The Presentations at the 40th AIVC - 8th TightVent - 6th venticool Conference: "From energy crisis to sustainable indoor climate - 40 years of AIVC" held in Ghent, Belgium on 15-16 October 2019.

In 2017 the Danish Building and Property Agency started a project titled “Avoiding energy waste in ventilation systems” by tracking the actual energy use in a sample of their 4 million m2 portfolio of buildings through on-line energy management tools. The project is not complete, but the key preliminary findings  described in this paper are: 

Thermal comfort improvement at the lowest energy consumption is a key issue when dealing with sustainability in buildings. An appropriate passive design is mandatory under those circumstances. Prior to construction, simulation tools help to make designs more sustainable. However, it is recognized a gap between real performance and the predicted one. This article presents the comfort methodology applied in an office building located in the north of Spain, characterized by a continental Mediterranean climate.

Over the last three years the understanding, adoption and use of BIM has gained international momentum.

In Portugal, the external thermal insulation systems (ETIS) are nowadays a current technical solution in residential buildings, contrasting with the rarely used internal thermal insulation systems (ITIS). In this paper, a quantitative analysis on ITIS is done based on three hygrothermal façade requirements: interstitial condensations, thermal bridges, and temperature variations across the external wall. Computer simulation was used as research tool.