English

An integrated approach to energy management and auditing over the past 10 years has turned Australia's Parliament House into an energy champion. Total energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions over that time have been culled by an impressive 52.3% and 41.2% respectively. Equally impressive is the fact that all energy efficiency improvements have been fully funded from energy savings.

In 1991 the UK Audit Commission produced energy performance indicators for hospitals based on the type of care provided. However, an analysis of over I 00 hospitals throughout 1he United Kingdom has found the type of care provided to have relatively little effect on rhe energy performance of hospital . Although other factors influenced energy use to some degree, the major factor affecting performance was found to be the plan of the hospital, as this influenced the amount of mechanical ventilation required.

Defective and energy inefficient windows, such as single-pane windows, can be responsible for up to 70% of a home's heating and cooling load. An innovative internal storm window system designed to reduce energy loss through single-pane windows was field tested in three occupied homes in the southeastern part of the United States to demonstrate its energy savings impact. The test results indicated that this system, called the "Winsulator" system, reduced window-related energy consumption for heating and cooling by 29%.

Ekoporten, a block of flats converted into an experimental sustainable building, is now 2+1/2 years old. The building is one of the most visited and debated projects carried out in Sweden in recent years. With the support of the Swedish Council for Building Research, researchers from the Faculty of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (KTH) have followed up and documented the experiment.

The laminar flow for a backwards facing step is studied. This work was initially part of the work presented in [l]. In that work low-Reynolds number effects was studied, and the plan was also to include laminar flow. However, it turned out that when the numerical predictions of the laminar flow (Re= 118) was compared to the experiments of Restivo [2), we found a large discrepancy. We believe that there is something wrong in that experimental investigation.

The principal soil gases of current concern to building are radon and landfill gas. The flow of these is generally thought to be dominated by viscous flow driven by pressure differences. This paper compares analytical results presented in two previous papers, an experiment to measure the flow of gas in soil and an analytical result found by another technique. The results support the findings of the previous work.

The principal soil gases of current concern to building are radon and landfill gas. The flow of these is generally thought to be dominated by viscous flow under a pressure gradient. This paper presents results for such pressure-driven flow of gas for problems relating to a building with a bare soil floor, for example below a suspended timber floor. The solutions address this problem in two dimensions as a mixed boundary problem.

The principal soil gases of current concern to building are radon and landfill gas. The flow of these is generally considered to be dominated by viscous flow driven by pressure differences. This paper presents results for the pressure-driven flow of gas for problems relating to a building with a bare soil floor, for example below a suspended timber floor. This paper builds on a previous paper by mapping the solution to a mixed boundary problem onto another geometry. In a third paper these results will be compared with an analytical result from elsewhere and an experiment.