English

Many studies have shown that the use of mixed-mode cooling can bring down the cooling load significantly while maintaining satisfactory in door air quality and thermal comfort. But there is little information available concerning mixed-mode cooling in China. Thus, basing on design parameters of design standard, A series of computer simulation of a typical mixed-cooling apartment in Guilin, lies south-west of China, was conducted by Eneryplus and Climate Consultant software.

For several years indoor comfort is measured in halls of hospitals by architecture students from the Delft University of Technology. Questionnaires and interviews have shows that patients and visitors have very few complaints about the indoor comfort in hospital halls.  

Adaptive thermal comfort model has been widely used to evaluate the thermal comfort level of natural ventilation buildings.However, current adaptive standards offer a simple linear relationship between the outdoor temperature and the indoor comfort temperature，ignoring the influence of solar radiation.

Ventilation is critical in interpreting indoor air quality (IAQ), yet few IAQ assessments report ventilation rates; even when they do, the measurement method is often not fully described. Most ventilation assessments use a tracer gas test (TGT) to measure total air change rate. In a TGT, the indoor air is marked with an easily identifiable gas (tracer) so that the air change rate can be inferred by monitoring the tracer’s injection rate and concentration.

Measuring ventilation rates in occupied dwellings is challenging but represents the conditions that occupants experience. This paper explores the constraints of existing methods when measuring the ventilation rate of occupied buildings and proposes a new method addressing some of them.  

Infiltration is an uncontrolled contribution to ventilation in a building and can contribute significantly to the total ventilation rate, particularly in older, leaky, dwellings which can rely on infiltration to provide adequate indoor air quality. However, as explored in this paper, using a whole house airtightness metric to characterise ventilation rates can fail to identify low ventilation rates in specific rooms. 

Indoor air quality is the chemical, physical and biological properties that indoor air must have to not cause any negative impact on occupants’ health and provide comfort: feel fresh, pleasant and stimulating. 

Installing Natural Ventilation (NV) system in office buildings leads to the reduction of energy consumption of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), which accounts for approximately 50% of total in an office building in Japan. However, it is difficult to estimate the NV performance before its completion, because the NV system is easily affected by the outdoor environment. Thus, its design method is not yet established.

Building energy simulation (BES) and Airflow network (AFN) programs generally incorporate wind pressure coefficients (Cp) estimated from secondary sources, namely data bases or analytical models. As these coefficients are influenced by a wide range of parameters, it is difficult to obtain reliable Cp data. This leads to uncertainties in BES-AFN models results, especially for naturally ventilated building studies, where air change rate which strongly depends on Cp, is a key value for thermal comfort and energy consumption results.

This study aims to experimentally evaluate the influence of the combination of a supply only ventilation, called here positive input ventilation, and innovative active air vents on the Indoor Air Quality of a house. The positive input ventilation draws fresh air from the outside, filters and pre-heats it before blowing it in living areas. Active air vents are small motorised damper set up in upper parts of windows that can move according to local pollutants measurements or according to the measurements of the other active air vents in the house.