English

This study investigates the impact of air tightness assumptions on the accuracy of energy performance predictions generated by building simulation of Australian office buildings.  The first part of this paper will present the results of air leakage testing of a number of Australian office buildings performed by the author in conjunction with a commercial air leakage testing company.

This paper discusses the potential of a Solar Assisted Ground-­Source  Heat  Pump  (SAGSHP)  system  configuration  with  unglazed  solar  collectors  to supply space heating in French office buildings, with reduced capital cost.  Experimental  results  are  used    to  develop  validated  TRNSYS  component  models  for  the  unglazed  solar collectors and the heat pump. A complete TRNSYS model  (system  and  building)  is  then  developed  to  assess the potential of this SAGSHP configuration in a typical office building in France.

This paper introduces a newly developed multi-criteria decision making tool called RR-PARETO and its application to HVAC design. As an illustration, five criteria have been selected, namely, power consumption, thermal comfort, risk of infection of influenza and tuberculosis and effective differential temperature (Δteq) of body parts, with the objective of selecting the optimal air exchange rate that makes reasonable trade-offs among the criteria.

Designers oversize HVAC systems for various reasons, and some reasons are more justifiable than others. In oversizing the system, the designers are essentially asking the building owner to incur the financial penal-ties of oversizing throughout the life of the HVAC sys-tem in favor of the theoretical benefit of perfect oc-cupant comfort during the combination of all possible extreme conditions.

One of the big challenges in comparing measured and simulated energy performance of buildings is that most energy models do not capture the significant impact of installation, operational and degradation HVAC system faults on actual energy performance in buildings. EnergyPlus, a comprehensive whole building performance simulation tool, also has limited capability of modeling HVAC faults. The research described in this paper identifies, characterizes and prioritizes common faults of HVAC equipment and control systems, some of which are incorporated in EnergyPlus.

The work presented in this paper aims to compare two different climates in Australia and Reunion Island and to identify the similarities in terms of bioclimatic design of low energy building.

Guidelines for the safe design of semi-open car parks require a minimum amount of open façade in order to ensure an effective removal of heat and smoke during a car fire. In this study the fire safety level is assessed by the use of validated Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of different design variants. The fire safety is assessed using temperature and sight length criteria for safe deployment of the fire department. Results show that 3 out of 7 studied variants did not meet these criteria.

Because of their low cost, small air conditioning, systems are often installed without any study on building envelope performance and without strictly complying with the rules of art. This article presents a pragmatic and global approach to diagnose performances of air-conditioned building relying on a numerical tool and dynamic simulations of buildings coupled with HVAC systems. Simulations calculate the required cooling power and evaluate the impact of the implementation and of maintenance.

In this paper, analysis is performed on the uncer-tainty in energy consumption calculated from whole-building energy models of two different building de-signs; a typical code compliant building, and the same building redesigned with high performance elements. We perform sensitivity analysis which reveals which parameters (out of approximately 900) influence the uncertainty in the consumption of energy in the build-ing model the most. We conclude that the most sensi-tive parameters of the model relate to building opera-tion (i.e.

The aim of thise paper is to take the advantage of CFD application in calculating, optimising, and designing air curtains used to separate smoke free zones in case of fire. Properly designed air curtain produces a pressure drop which forbids transversal flow through the opening. Most air curtains are tested on scaled down models which are difficult to extrapolate. The intention of this paper is to present the possibilities of CFD while designing air curtains used in fire safety engineering.