VIP

This paper summarises presentations and discussions that took place during the workshop entitled “ Trends in national building ventilation markets and drivers for change” held in Ghent, Belgium, in march 2008 with a specific focus on envelope and ductwork airtightness. Before this workshop, experts were asked to provide information regarding the trends in ventilation in their country and the difficulties they felt to improve the situation in terms of market penetration of innovative systems, indoor air quality and energy use requirements, and compliance check schemes.

Recently, there has been a growing public concern over indoor air quality not only in buildings but also in vehicles. Since the vehicle is the main form of daily transportation for most people, of particular concern is the symptoms suffered by both drivers and passengers such as fatigue, headache, and eye stimulation caused by formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from the interior materials of newly assembled vehicles.

The Czech Republic is a landlocked country located in the centre of Europe. The area of the Czech Republic is 78,866 km2 and its population is about 10.4 million people. The Czech Republic was part of the former Czechoslovakia until 1993 and it has been a member state of the European Union since May 2004. The Czech Republic is an industrialized country enjoying a decent gross domestic product (GDP) growth (6.6 percent in 2007). The GDP per capita is currently at about 82 percent of the average of the 27 EU member states.

Apartment buildings are the most common type of residence in Korea, but since the 1970s it was difficult to supply fresh air due to airtight exterior walls that were constructed with energy conservation in mind. In addition to this problem, Sick House Syndrome and Multi Chemical Sensitivity issues arose from having used petrochemical building materials and furniture that often emit volatile organic compounds and formaldehyde with high possibilities.

Technology in building physics and mechanical engineering for building ventilation may not be totally new area and must have rather long history and much knowledge accumulation of their own.
Nowadays, the distance between the engineering field and society looks becoming shorter, since there are stronger needs from the society than before to reduce the environmental impact of the buildings and to enhance the indoor environmental quality with cost effectiveness, at the same time.

The Polish ventilation market is changing rapidly.
There are a number of key forces that drive the changes in the Polish ventilation market; the consumers, the rising energy costs, the incorporation of a great number of CEN standards into the set of Polish Standards and the implementation of the EPB Directive.

The paper presents an overview on building ventilation, indoor air quality and energy requirements in Brazil.
Regulations, standards and market practices are reviewed.

The residential ventilation market is changing rapidly in the United States.
Dwellings are going from having no designed ventilation systems to have to meet specific requirements.
The drivers are local codes and large scale programs being implemented by states and utilities and the federal government.
Residential ventilation products are adapting to meet the evolving needs of the market.
New products are coming out frequently and presumably more are in development.
By contrast the market for nonresidential ventilation is reasonably mature.

IAQ and ventilation is given rather high attention in the Norwegian building industry.
The new energy demands, basically an implementation of the EPBD, are a major driver for change.
In practice it makes modern energy efficient ventilation compulsory in all types of buildings, which was not the case up to now.

Performance based indoor climate and ventilation regulations, having mainly been based on the requirements for the end result with fewer requirements for the system description, supported by a voluntary advanced indoor climate classification and labelling system, have arguably led to the best indoor climate standard in the world in both residential and commercial buildings.

In this respect, the Finnish story is ultimately a success story.
On the energy performance side, the primitive regulation based only on the requirements of U-values has caused some drawbacks.