English

Due to climate change, Western Europe is experiencing a surge in cooling demand, leading to higher summer temperatures accompanied by longer and stronger heat waves, thereby intensifying the toll on our buildings. This signals the need for architects to design buildings that take advantage of passive technics to provide thermal comfort. In recent years, natural ventilation has become a widely used method for reducing energy consumption and expenses. However, the utilization of natural ventilation can be restricted due to heatwaves and the impacts of climate change.

Due to its high demands regarding indoor environmental conditions, healthcare facilities are associated with high energy consumption. To move forward towards more demand driven and energy reduced conditioning, information on occupancy and temperature boundary conditions are crucial. Thermography-based systems enable data acquisition regarding both aspects in high local resolution. In this publication, we propose a thermography system that may be used for monitoring of rooms in healthcare facilities.

Urban settings and climate change both impact energy use, thermal comfort and ventilation of buildings. This is more noticeable in hot urban areas where the urban heat island effect is more pronounced; also, in densely built urban areas where thermal comfort in naturally ventilated buildings is affected by changes in natural ventilation rates because of surrounding obstructions. In some cases, overshadowing might alleviate the impact.

The future needs of indoor spaces in our buildings are likely to be cooling focused. With the widespread use of air-conditioning (AC) on the horizon there is now a need to ensure our systems perform as renewables (under the relevant definitions). A key part of tackling the uptake in energy intensive AC is likely to be the balancing of AC with renewable natural and mechanical ventilative cooling (VC).

Airtight, highly insulated, and passively cooled buildings in the EU are designed under typical outdoor and indoor thermal conditions. With increasing risk and uncertainty with regards to climate change and associated heatwaves(HW), the design thermal performance of these buildings is not guaranteed. It is crucial to focus on improving thermal resilience to overheating and futureproof these buildings. “Thermal resilience to overheating” is the characteristic that describes the extent to which buildings and their cooling strategies can maintain habitable conditions during or post shocks.

This article provides a summary of a comprehensive examination of the current ISO 9972 standard, focusing on the enhancements needed to improve its reliability and validity for airtightness tests in buildings. A working group composed of international experts has identified a list of issues warranting a potential revision of the standard. New recommendations are proposed based on research and consultation, including detailed considerations of previous guidelines and existing scientific literature.

The content presented comes from the paper under review “Quantitative correlation between buildings air permeability indicators: statistical analyses of about 500,000 measurements” (Moujalled, 2023a).

Improving the knowledge on uncertainty for fan pressurization measurement is of first importance. It allows to assess the reliability of the measurement, which is essential when comparing the results with benchmarks or standards, but it also gives a better understanding, and thus a chance of improving, the measurement procedure. In this context, recent studies on alternative regression techniques highlights the importance of identifying and quantifying the sources of uncertainty.

Gas-phase air cleaners can be used to either reduce occupant dissatisfaction for the same outdoor air flow rate or to reduce the outdoor air flow rate for the same resulting occupant satisfaction based on its clean air delivery rate (CADR). The latter lowers the required ventilation rate for the same indoor air quality and can thus lead to a reduction in energy use for preheating/cooling and from transporting the outside air. However, there is no current method or metric for determining the energy benefit of installing a portable air cleaner.

This manuscript discusses the energy-saving benefits of gas-phase air cleaning in Nordic buildings. Ventilation systems are crucial in creating a healthy and comfortable indoor environment. These systems account for around 30% of building heat losses in cold climate regions. Indoor emissions from materials, occupants, and outdoor pollutants are key to ensuring acceptable indoor air quality levels. Therefore, this study focuses on using gas-phase air cleaning technologies in low-energy centralized air handling units.