English

This paper describes the measured and calculated results of air humidity and profiles of tracer gas in a residential apartment in Taipei city, Taiwan. A complete multizone indoor air quality model was used to evaluate the test results. The concentration of C02 were employed to investigate the indoor pollutant transport. Also, the indoor air humidity was studied in order to evaluate the indoor moisture effects on human. The data from the measurements were used as simulation input data for the calculation of indoor air flow rates and pollutant concentrations.

Building refurbishment mainly concerns physical and functional building components but should also take into account various topics such as energy consumption, pollutant emission and operational waste reduction as well as air quality and spatial comfort. Against this background, the European project EPIQR offers a new concept which should allow architects to approach the refurbishment of residential buildings with a global view of the whole process. In any refurbishment process, the preparation phase is of utmost importance.

The use of air-conditioning is known to be an energy-intensive solution to the problem of providing thermally comfortable conditions in buildings. This has led to the adoption of new techniques, such as displacement ventilation and chilled ceiling systems as a means for providing the cooling requirements. In addition, benefits are gained in terms of indoor air quality and comfort. However, there is a lack of information about the effect that chilled ceiling has on displacement air flow, and the corresponding implications for occupant thermal comfort.

New office buildings in Spain are nearly always designed to be air conditioned. The architect Emilio Miguel Mitre Associates (EMMA) has designed a building which avoids air conditioning, thereby reducing energy demand. The design uses the principles of high thermal mass combined with night ventilation, reduction of solar gain during the summer months, high levels of insulation, evaporative cooling, and buried pipes to provide cooling when the external temperature rises above 30°C.

Increasing demands for energy saving and a higher degree of comfort in rooms compels designers or architects to use more sophisticated analysis methods. The measurement in situ, numerical simulation (CFO), and wind tunnel investigations are three of methods which are always utilised to analyse or to assess air flow in rooms and their environment. However, these methods remain generally very difficult for the majority of the designers or the architects.

This paper outlines progress in the THERMIE Target project Energy Comfort 2000 after three and a half years. Seven of the eight buildings are under construction and the eighth will be starting on site in May 1997. The project covers the design, construction, commissioning and monitoring of the buildings which are offices, university buildings, and public and recreational buildings, together with "horizontal activities" which link the projects together.

This paper describes and discusses the energy saving design features of the Learning Resources Centre at Anglia Polytechnic University. As part of the University's policy on environmental conservation, the design brief for this new Queen's Building specified a low energy passive design solution. The building, which has been occupied since September 1994, was awarded a THERMIE grant to demonstrate a 50% reduction in the annual energy related carbon dioxide emissions for a building of this type.

The LCA methodology [SETAC] is applied to buildings. The system limits, functional units and allocation principles are explained. Inventories have been established for 150 buildings materials and linked to the ECOINVENT database. Buildings are described on the basis of specifications which are aggregated to (cost planning)-elements. There is a catalogue of several hundred elements. Energy needs, costs and environmental impact are calculated simultaneously. Different views are possible (type of Impact. life time phase, element).

Environmental assessment of building elements and buildings requires environmental data related to the entire life cycle of the materials, inventory tools and assessment models for environmental impacts important to buildings. For that reason environmental data have been collected for a number of building materials in a project linked to a major Danish project on Environmental Management in Building Design.

Indoor Air Quality analysis needs at first an accurate prediction of indoor pollutant concentration levels. However, most of pollutant concentration prediction models consider the pollutants as passive elements. Our study introduces the more common gas-phase chemical reactions occurring in indoor spaces. We developed a model taking into account more than 20 different reactions influencing the concentration level prediction of NOx compounds, ozone, carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide from the knowledge acquired in the field of tropospheric chemistry.