English

Ventilation plays an important role in the RT 2000 regulation. The ventilation system is of course taken into account, but also the building envelope airtigthness on which this paper focuses.

This paper briefly exams the role of the building envelope in determining the internal environmental conditions in buildings and the scope for holistic design of building services and building envelope. It then looks at how holistic design may be undertaken, the barriers to be overcome to enable this to happen and the incentives that are necessary.

We investigate the airtightness of 12 French non-residential buildings, by means of experimental fan-depressurization tests. For this study, 12 recent large (volume > 500 m 3 ) buildings have been chosen according to the construction structure and the activity. Four categories of buildings have been selected : hotels, schools, offices and polyvalent halls. We assessed the air leakage rate of each building, with a fan-depressurization equipment, following the recommendations of the international norm project ISO 9972.

The NEN 5128 "Energy performance of dwellings and residential buildings- Determination method" [1] describes a procedure to calculate the energy performance coefficient EPC. The requirements are given in the Dutch Building Decree [2]. The energy performance is expressed as an Energy Performance Characteristic (EPC). In this EPC procedure ventilation and air tightness play an important role. This paper describes the role of ventilation and air tightness in the Energy Performance Standard. Moreover it gives the alternative way of the so called equivalence principle.

This paper illustrates the airtightness and ventilation performance of a recently built ecological house in Helsinki, Finland. The wood frame house, which is built with no plastic vapour retarder, has a satisfactory air tightness (3 ach at 50 Pa). The ventilation measurements show that the outdoor ventilation rate provided by the natural ventilation system tended to be lacking (i.e., less than the required value of 0.5 ach) even though the measured CO2 concentrations were generally satisfactory (i.e., below 1000 ppm) when the bedroom doors were open.

A major concern of those wishing to limit the energy use in buildings is the growing trend towards installing air-conditioning in new and refurbished buildings. Building design, high thermal loads, and a desire for perceived comfort, contribute to an ever-growing demand for full air-conditioning. Therefore, to counter the impact on building energy use, it is essential that building design and operation is developed to minimise the use of air conditioning systems.

Most dwellings in the United States are ventilated primarily through leaks in the building shell (i.e., infiltration) rather than by whole-house mechanical ventilation systems. Consequently, quantification of envelope air-tightness is critical to determining how much energy is being lost through infiltration and how much infiltration is contributing toward ventilation requirements. Envelope air tightness and air leakage can be determined from fan pressurization measurements with a Blower Door. Tens of thousands of unique fan pressurization measurements have been made of U.S.

Passive cooling techniques driven purely by natural wind forces present a highly attractive environmental solution in the perspective of low energy architecture. The physics governing passive cooling are well understood and have been extensively discussed in the literature. Indeed the necessary design details that must be incorporated to achieve the full potential of the technique, such as exposed thermal massive and good internal and solar gain control, are also well understood.

This paper presents a passive design strategy where thermal comfort is achieved by engaging the occupants to define their own comfort condition and vary the quality of the space according to their needs. Two naturally ventilated houses in South Australia designed with this approach were tested and their actual performance documented. The results showed that most of the time the houses were always comfortable without any assistance from active systems.

The measurement and simulation of energy consumption and comfort is undertaken for a primary school in Melbourne, Australia. Four classrooms are measured providing data sets of air temperature, humidity, heating and lighting energy consumption in conjunction with external weather measurements over a full year. The primary investigation is to assess two different heating systems: electric radiant ceiling panels versus gas convective air heating.