ventilation

International there are many different requirements and regulations for ventilation.  Sometimes the variation is more than a factor of five. There are strong drivers to reduce energy consumption for HVAC, and therefore the spread in requirements and regulation is worthwhile to study. To reduce ventilation flows there is a necessity to understand the reasons behind. Demand control to reduce this flows is in many countries growing but the control parameters are quite different, for instance humidity versus CO2 control.

As a result of new inquiries in 20 countries the ventilation requirements will be presented for different rooms in dwellings, offices and schools. These rooms are differentiated between wet rooms such as toilets, bathroom and kitchen and typical rooms for these buildings for instance classrooms and office rooms. The results show big differences between countries. Climate and building style can have an effect on ventilation requirements. Some countries have to only requirements for specific rooms but also for whole house and whole building ventilation.

From September 2015 to March 2016, UTC engaged in a major refurbishment of its Design and Research Center located in Culoz (France).

Recent studies have shown that ventilative cooling reduces overheating, improves summer comfort and decreases cooling loads. Therefore, it is considered as one of the most efficient way to improve summer comfort. Although, HVAC designers still lack of guidelines to improve the energy and comfort efficiency of their installations.  

In order to better address energy and indoor air quality issues, ventilation needs to become smarter. A key smart ventilation concept is to use controls to ventilate more at times it provides either an energy or IAQ advantage (or both) and less when it provides a disadvantage. This would be done in a manner that provides improved home energy and IAQ performance, relative to a “dumb” base case. A favorable context exists in many countries to develop smart ventilation strategies.

Indoor environment and indoor air quality (IAQ) are considered as subjects of major concern: as we build more and more energy efficient and airtight buildings, the conflicting issues of energy efficiency, adverse health effects and discomfort become more relevant. Significant rates of malfunctions of ventilation systems are still observed among new constructions.

The “VIA-Qualité” project (2013-2016) aims at developing quality management (QM) approaches (ISO 9001) on ventilation and indoor air quality (IAQ), for low-energy, single-family buildings. The goal of these QM approaches is to improve both ventilation and IAQ actual in-situ performance. The main benefits of those approaches are to: 1-Improve ventilation system performance from design to implementation; 2-Limit indoor internal pollution sources, monitoring building materials selection and design regarding the outdoor pollution sources; 3-Improve final users understanding.