English

To describe the quality of adhesive joints and connections for airtight layers, our research includes comprehensive investigations into the effect of different working conditions and accelerated aging.

Today, labels introduced in some countries to certify standardised low energy buildings, such as ‘Passive House’ in Germany and ‘Minenergie’ in Switzerland, are becoming increasingly applied in Europe.  Both labels explicitly require a threshold level of airtightness (0.6 air changes per hour (ACH) at 50 Pa). For timber frame passive houses in Belgium, this requirement is commonly achieved by sealing all the joints in the interior structural sheathing, mostly consisting of Oriented Strand Boards (OSB).

The air tightness of building has been a serious problem over the last 30 years. In 1979 the international Air Infiltration Centre (AIC) was erected within the International Energy Agency (IEA) platform. Infiltration of cold air into buildings needs to be heated to reach to a comfortable indoor climate. But the energy penalty due to that should be minimized. The AIC (later AIVC) had as one of their tasks to find solutions for good air tight buildings and to promote the knowledge about building construction to reach acceptable level of air tightness of buildings.

We have developed a simple model to estimate ductwork leakage and heat conduction losses in steady-state conditions for a balanced ventilation system. Implemented in a spreadsheet, it allows us to calculate their impact on heat recovery efficiency consistently with EN 15241 without the need for a dynamic simulation tool. One case study shows that the global heat recovery of a balanced ventilation system with a nominal heat recovery of 80% can be reduced to less than 50% if the ductwork leakage and thermal resistance are poor.

This document presents a study for examining the viability of hybrid ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems that use solar thermal collectors as the supplemental component in heating dominated buildings. Loads for an actual house in the City of Milton near Toronto were estimated.

The mathematical model and design software tool KOLEKTOR 2.2 with user-friendly interface for detailed modeling of solar thermal flat-plate collectors has been built and experimentally validated for different solar thermal flat-plate collector concepts.

Since naturally ventilated buildings respond to site conditions and microclimate, there is no ”one set of spe-cific criteria” for every naturally ventilated building. So natural ventilation should be optimized to deal with ther-mal comfort in passive buildings during hot season.

In this work a numerical model, which simulates the buildings thermal response with complex topology and evaluates the indoor environment comfort, in transient conditions, is used in the energy and thermal comfort evaluation for different passive solutions in a kindergarten, in Summer conditions.

An  inverter-driven air-to-air heat pump model has been developped and implemented in the thermal simulation tool COMFIE, in order to compare the seasonal performance of a variable capacity air-to-air heat pump coupled with temperate air sources (crawlspace, attic, sunspace, heat recovery ventilation, earth-to-air heat exchanger) with the performance of a conventionally installed heat pump. The empirical model of the heat pump is presented in this paper, including full-load and part-load model at rating and non rating conditions, and also frosting conditions.

The main objective of this study is to develop and validate a systematic methodology to model a system of buried pipes, assisted by a solar chimney to promote the natural ventilation, in the whole building simulation software ESP-r (Clarke 2001), from a software user perspective. This development was supported by monitored data collected at an experimental site in Évora, Portugal.  A multi-zone ESP-r model was built to represent the entire installation using a nodal airflow network approach.