English

In Amstelveen, The Netherlands, an apartment complex of forty two units has been build. Sixteen units are extreme low energy apartments. These apartments are very well isolated and have air tight facades.

During recent years, energy consumption of buildings for cooling purposes has significantly increased. In order to reduce the energy consumption while maintaining high levels of thermal comfort, building research has been oriented towards the appropriate use of the natural heat sinks. The present paper provides comparative information regarding the performance of the more important passive and hybrid cooling techniques involving the use of a natural heat sink.

Within the framework of full-scale experimental validation of the global building energy simulation software programme CLIM2000 developed by Electricity Applications in Residential and Commercial Buildings Branch of Electricite De France (EDF is the French utility company) Research and Development Division, an experimentation has been carried out in a 100 m2 real house from Oct 95 to May 96. The first step was to predict in « blind way » the total electrical power consumption of the house on the basis of three different meteorological situations (cold, hot and medium).

The draft of the European prestandard 17 52, entitled "Ventilation for buildings – Design criteria for the indoor environment" is intended to be a flexible tool for assisting the designer in providing a proper indoor environment for people in ventilated buildings. It specifies how the quality of the indoor environment, comprising the thermal environment, the air quality and the acoustic environment can be expressed.

This paper reports the analysis of the thermal performance of building envelopes of high-rise commercial buildings in the subtropical climate and their interactions with cooling system. Building constructions of commercial buildings in Hong Kong have been investigated and categorized. Their thermal performance and the resulting chiller load is studied with the building energy simulation tool DOE-2. lD. The characteristics of subtropical climate, coupled to high internal gains of commercial buildings, are discussed.

This study presents a new method of interior air motion assessment using artificial neural networks. The air motion inside a building depends not only on the external wind velocity, but also to a great extent on most of architectural parameters such as position and orientation of building, size and configuration of windows, roof geometry, whether the building is stilted or not, etc ..

This paper presents a study of the dynamics of the turbulent mixing of a hot or cold air stream with the air in the interior of a building zone. Observations and CFO results of transient temperature behaviour in a fully developed jet flow field are presented. A simple model for the characteristic time-constant of the mixing process in a room is derived. The mixing of a turbulent jet, as a function of position inside the room, is also discussed. This mixing time-constant plays an important role in total system dynamic behaviour and stability.