English

If a proposed European standard on indoor air quality gets the green light, architects and engineers could face the biggest upheaval in design practice since the invention of air conditioning. Dogged by constant controversy, the so-called Fanger standard is now out for a European vote. The Scandinavians say it will work, the UK says not. Who is right? Building Services Journal and the BRE convened a top team of designers and architects to find out.

Passive stack ventilation is a means of removing unwanted moisture from dwellings. The proper design and installation of these systems is vital to their successful performance. This paper gives detailed guidance on this subject and is in support of the 1995 edition of the Approved Document to Part F of the Building Regulations.

NatVent™ is a seven nation pan-European project which aims to reduce primary energy consumption (and consequently C02 emissions) in buildings by providing solutions to barriers which prevent the uptake of natural ventilation and low-energy cooling in countries with moderate and cold climates. It also aims to encourage and accelerate the use of natural ventilation and 'smart' controls as the main design option in new-designs and major refurbishments of office-type buildings.

A buoyancy-capture principle is firstly revisited as the most important fluid dynamics mechanism in kitchen range hoods. A recent new derivation of the capture efficiency of a kitchen range hood, which eliminates the inconsistencies and inadequacies of existing derivations, shows that the capture efficiency equals the ratio of capture flow rate to total plume flow rate in a confined space. The result is applied here, together with the buoyancy-capture principle, to derive a simple formula for determining capture efficiency.

Currently one of the most rapidly growing areas receiving attention is energy efficiency in buildings. In this context naturally ventilated buildings are an inevitable design solution. This paper reports preliminary observations of a project aimed at investigating pollution levels within these type of buildings. Due to the difficulty of predicting and controlling the amount of suspended particles entering naturally ventilated buildings an understanding of the type of pollutants, their size and their composition is necessary.

This paper describes the results of a computational fluid dynamics study to assess the air freshness and percentage of dissatisfied people due to air quality in a partitioned office with different supply air diffusers. The numerical model involves the finite-volume approach of solving governing equations for mass and momentum, assuming that the buoyancy effects are negligibly small in comparison to the inertial effects. The k-s two-equation model of turbulence is used to predict the turbulence transport of flow properties.