English

Detached residential wooden houses are a common type of housing in Japan. Decay of wooden components within the walls caused by condensation or defective flushing, is sometimes an issue. To solve this problem, a double-skin system with a room-side air gap was developed. In this system, during summer, the airflow that is driven by ventilation fans moves through the room-side air gap in the wall, and removes heat load either from the inner surface of the insulation material, or from the surface adjacent to the rooms inside.

In this article, it will be shown how heat recovery ventilation with closed-loop ground heat exchange performs in practice, in a residential building in Nijeveen, The Netherlands. A state diagram is presented to explain when heat recovery and/or ground heat exchange is used during the year.

Maintaining an IAQ with fresh in school building is very important because the good IAQ can keep the student in health and improve the academic performance. Since school buildings are very dense and require a lot of fresh air, the need for ventilation has become obvious. While opening a window does provide fresh air, which is undesirable for the indoor climate and for energy efficiency under severe outdoor condition. ERV (Energy Recovery Ventilation) technology offers an optimal solution: fresh air, better climate control and energy efficiency.

A good level of thermal insulation and an adequate thermal capacity of the building envelope are essential to achieve good energy performance. Many studies have been conducted about this topic, mostly focused on the reduction of energy losses, peak load control and energy savings. Nevertheless, very few studies were realized addressing both insulation and inertia of the building envelope in a thermal comfort perspective, and taking into account the combined effect of different ventilation strategies.

Large, multi-storey buildings pose a particular challenge for natural ventilation design due to the interaction between heat and air flows through different building zones. We develop a demand-based preliminary design strategy for sizing ventilation openings in multi-storey buildings with heated atriums. This approach enables ventilation openings on each storey, and in the atrium, to be rapidly sized so that equal temperatures and per-person flow rates can be achieved on all storeys, regardless of the occupancy or usage.

A characterization and modeling process has been conducted in order to better account for ventilative cooling in the evaluation of energy performance of buildings. The proposed approach has been tested using a monitored zero energy Active House (Maison Air et lumière) located near Paris.

This work is based on the RESHYVENT project  in which the effectiveness of hybrid (i.e. combined natural and mechanical ventilation) was measured and investigated in the urban canyon of Athens, Greece – the most important conclusion being that natural ventilation is dominant. It is suggested that the individual reaction to Air Conditioned Buildings should be better investigated, since many people ask for the comfort associated with natural ventilation. 

Common experiences, standards, and laboratory studies show that increased air velocity helps to offset warm sensation due to high environmental temperatures. In warm climate regions the opening of windows and the use of desk or ceiling fans are the most common systems to generate increased airflows to compensate for higher environmental temperatures at the expense of no or relatively low energy consumption.

Public residential buildings in Singapore are designed as naturally ventilated. As climate changes, the indoor thermal comfort becomes critical as it depends greatly on the outdoor weather condition. The Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) model developed for Singapore (Givoni, et al., 2006) which depends on indoor air temperature and air speed is used to predict the indoor thermal comfort.

The climate of Greece is typical Mediterranean with wet, cool winters and hot, dry summers. The temperature range is on average between 5°C to 35°C without many extreme temperatures and weather events. The cool sea breeze on the islands makes summer conditions milder. According to researchers and assessment reports of the United Nations climate change is inevitable in the 21st century. Regional climate models related to Greece show low uncertainties.