English

This project is intended to supply information to architects and engineers throughout Europe to support the Energy Directive on Buildings through providing design and engineering details of high quality, low energy consumption public buildings throughout the EU. Buildings will be chosen from the participating countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) as well as from other European countries in different climatic zones. In total this means 25 buildings.

Sunlight is necessary for life. Managing sunlight is necessary to achieve a level of comfort for living. Radiation transfer through glazing has an impact on costs for heating, cooling and lighting in a building and on environment. The energy that is gained or lost may be solar or thermal energy. Glazing materials are known to respond differently to these two types of energy. This paper provides a comfortable choice in solar design by providing an understanding of solar energy and the tools for managing the amount and type of sunlight permitted through glazing systems.

Heat island is a very well documented climatic phenomenon that has an important energy and environmental impact in the urban environment. The main energy problems are related to the important increase of the energy consumption for cooling purposes as well as to the important increase of the peak electricity load. Heat island in Athens, Greece, is measured during the last decade and its energy impact is calculated in details. The aim of the present paper is to estimate the direct and indirect environmental impact of the heat island effect in Athens.

A well-known parameter in the calculation of solar gains for the heating requirements is the utilization factor concept. This parameter allows the assessment of the heating requirements diminishment due to the contribution of the solar gains, and it can be easily calculated as a function of the building inertia, and the ratio between solar gains to losses. The present paper analyses the utilization factor equation in order to obtain the relations among all the involved variables. Thus, using the transfer function method, a new and realistic utilization factor equation is obtained.

The building sector represents a great percentage of the total consumption of energy of a country, and of this, most is due to the existing buildings. The great number of existing buildings in comparison with the new buildings, and the worst constructive quality in the first ones, they explain the previous asseveration. It is, therefore, of a primordial importance, to promote measures guided to limit the energy consumption in these buildings, what can be obtained through the rehabilitation of the same ones.

A low energy technique for heat removal from the interior of a building under summer conditions is the employ of natural ventilation. There are several ways to promote this ventilation. The use of Trombe walls to obtain this objective is studied in the present work, with the aid of a combined mathematicaldifferences finites model. This is a transient model developed to take into account the thermal inertia of the wall and that can be easily applicable to a particular Trombe wall to estimate its behaviour.

The energy consumption matter for the building sector has come up again urgently looking for standards, measures, policies and best practices. That is because building sector have direct impact both on energy consumption and environment (cooling, heating, raw materials for construction, consumption of natural sources-water, fossil fuels and emissions of harmful substances). Buildings are responsible for the approximately 40% of the primary energy consumption in EU (164 millions buildings in EU- 15, 193 millions in EU-25) and for about 50% of CO2 emissions.

The use of centralized air-conditioning systems in buildings with fixed windows is becoming an increasingly high-risk strategy in buildings for a number of reasons. These include fuel insecurity and price rises, the need to reduce climate change emissions from the built environment, and the need to make buildings more robust in the face of the extreme weather events that are beginning to characterize climates in a warming world.

This paper challenges the conception that comfort can exist only w/in strict parameters, should be achieved w/o inhabitant interaction, and cannot be achieved w/o mechanical means. A period of research was conducted followed by the redefinition of several standards of practice. A mixed-use adaptive re-use design application was developed and simulated in an effort to combat the perceived necessity of mechanical cooling systems (Fig. 1).

As dry assembled multi-layered walls very often suffer overheating in hot climates because of their low thermal inertia, the appropriate use of Phase Change Materials (PCM) inside the same walls can increase their thermal mass before they reach high temperatures (which they tend to do when irradiated by the sun) avoiding overheating.