English

Achieving good building energy performance has been a major challenge in architecture but has intensified over the past twenty years. Today, the constant increasing cost of energy and the environmental impact of production and energy use make reduced energy use a significant objective in the design and operation of buildings. This paper addresses the general problem of minimizing building energy consumption and the associated operational costs of HVAC systems in an existing building.

China is rightly regarded as a country in which progress on developing sustainable and low energy solutions for building design is essential. The size of the population, the rapid urbanisation that is taking place, and the reliance on fossil fuel based energy sources, not only make this a priority for China but also for the rest of the world. The concept of zero emissions or zero energy buildings has been in existence for many years in the UK and other developed countries and more recently has evolved to larger scale examples such as the development of complete housing schemes.

A large number of design guidelines and tools are available for the design of passive cooling systems. However, the building engineer should take several uncertainties into account since the actual use of the building, the building physical properties or the user behaviour are uncertain. One promising approach to include these uncertainties in the design procedure is the use of statistical models: The design parameter is defined by a mean value and its deviation.

The insertion of Phase Change Materials (PCM) inside light dry assembled building envelopes seems to be the right way to solve overheating problems usually caused by the low thermal inertia of such walls.

This work aims at applying a numerical analysis methodology, based on CFD techniques, to evaluate the effect of the wind and the temperature over the quality vision of a new telescope in La Palma (Spain). This island constitutes one of the best places in the world to carry out astronomy experiments. However, small variations in the climate conditions, together with the particle dispersion, drastically affect the selection of the best place where this building may be installed.

Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) of buildings has begun to receive more attention from the UK construction industry. In many cases, POE results indicate that even advanced designed buildings are high energy consumers and caused high levels of discomfort amongst occupants. In the UK, there is a move for routine use of POE in the construction industry. This paper discusses the in-use performance of an Advanced Naturally Ventilated secondary school building in the UK. The building features open plan classrooms, night cooling and automatically controlled solar shading and ventilation openings.

The thermal and visual performance of eleven residential building has been studied during the architectural design. In order to evaluate the performance of the building a number of thermal and visual simulations have been done. The outputs of thermal simulations are the monthly values of heating and cooling load. Concerning the visual performance the calculations outputs are spatial distribution of the daylight factor, luminance and illuminance pictures. The final architectural design and the proposed interventions results to low energy consumption for cooling and heating too.

Today Contemporary Technology is the basic factor for the environmental protection and the Sustainable Development. Greenhouse gas emissions reduction requires measurement taking on several thematic fields in order to achieve Kyoto protocol objective, which is reduction of polluted gas emission by 5% in global level and by 8% in EU countries. Energy and Transport are the basic fields where contemporary technology is going to intervene. The basic effort is focused on the use of environmental friendly fuels, which seems to cause big financial cost in first level.

Forward of the shortage of energy resources, the rational use of the energy started to be a subject of great relevance. In the last years, the countries come taking conscience of this and searching alternatives to optimise the energy use. For constructed buildings, the alternative is to use installations efficiently. In this purpose, a posoccupation evaluation becomes necessary to know the building performance and then helps an energy management. In countries of hot climate, the external temperature affects the thermal building performance and its energy consumption.

This paper is an introduction into the architectural tradition of India from a climatic point of view for the PALENC 2005 1st International Conference. Most architects who visit India notice the sensitivity of the traditional architecture to the varied climatic comfort requirements. The traditional architectural skill has always achieved an aesthetic out of the climate sensitive forms. This paper is outlines that approach.