English

Cooking and cooking burners emit pollutants that can adversely affect indoor air quality in residences and significantly impact occupant health. Effective kitchen exhaust ventilation can reduce exposure to cooking-related air pollutants as an enabling step to healthier, low-energy homes. This report identifies barriers to the widespread adoption of kitchen exhaust ventilation technologies and practice and proposes a suite of strategies to overcome these barriers.

Trombe wall and high performance glazing are the façade system improvements used in this research. This paper reports about an ongoing investigation on a new façade system: "Façade Modules for Eco-Efficient Refurbishment of Buildings", focused on thermal performance of Trombe wall and glazing. Computational simulations were performed with DesignBuilder software for different arrangements of modules, occupancy profile and internal gains according to Portuguese reality.

We present a new approach to the optimisation of Double-Skin Facades (DSFs). Parameters defined possible geometries, shading devices, openings and ventilation paths, as well as control schedules for their operation. A genetic algorithm was used to discover the best configuration and control strategies for a given scenario from scratch, rather than using a partic-ular configuration type. The algorithm performed a thermal and air-flow simulation of each proposed solution using EnergyPlus. The optimisation process has been illustrated with a case study.

Integrated cavity-wall systems are typically designed to shade the exterior of buildings.  They can also eradicate daytime heat absorption by thermal convection. The combined heat loss through the natural nighttime sky radiation, the cavity wall shading effect, and the thermal convective loop results in a significantly improved building envelope performance. This paper outlines the design, construction, and monitoring of a south-facing cavity wall system integrated into a single-family residence in Southern Arizona.

The Israeli standard 5282 for energy rating of buildings includes, besides a Prescriptive path, a Performance Approach that requires using an hourly energy simulation model to demonstrate compliance.  In this work, we present the development of a Graphical User Interface (GUI), in which most of the expert knowledge needed to run such complex simulation model is embedded in it. The output of the evaluation is a certificate specifying the energy rating of each unit in the building, as well as the energy rating of the whole building.

For optimal conservation of the stored objects, museum storage buildings require a very stable interior climate, with only minimal and slow variations in temperature and relative humidity. Often extensive HVAC is installed to provide such stable indoor conditions, which results in a great amout of C02 emission. The purpose for this paper is to show that it is possible to reach the goal of using renewable energy for museum storage buildings by rethinking the strategy for the dehumidification design and in this way contribute to a C02 neutral environment.

This paper describes the results of a study aimed at assessing the effectiveness of Phase Change Materials (PCM) for the improvement of summer thermal comfort in lightweight buildings. The work is based on simulations on a test room in a real building. By varying the thickness of the PCM panel, installed on the inner side of the internal partitions of the test room, as well as the intensity of the night mechanical ventilation and the ways the panels are installed, some interesting conclusions concerning the effectiveness of PCMs on thermal comfort are obtained.

The drive to reduce carbon emissions and energy utilisation, directly associated with dwellings and to achieve a zero carbon home, suggests that the assessment of energy ratings will have an increasingly prioritised role in the built environment. Created by the Building Research Establishment (BRE), the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) is the UK Government’s recommended method of assessing the energy ratings of dwellings.

This paper investigates the accuracy of CFD simulation in predicting the nature of multiple plume interactions in a naturally ventilated indoor environment. RANS-based turbulence models; k-ε and RNG k-ε were used to predict the twin plume interaction experiment reported by Kaye and Linden (2004). It was observed that the k-ε turbulence model showed a large discrepancy with measurements while the results obtained from the RNG k-ε model were in better accord with the experimental results. A grid sensitivity analysis of the computational solution also formed part of this study. 

A kind of separate heat-pipe heat exchanger (SHP exchanger), which can move heat from indoor air to outdoor air by making use of their temperature difference, uses much less energy consumption than air-conditioning system in base station due to none of compressor. This study built up an annual energy-using simulation module of SHP exchanger in DeST by building the model of SHP exchanger and accomplishing the coupling calculation of it and the model of dynamic thermal process in building.