English

This paper presents the results of a field experiment made on 30 female office workers : they were investigated on their perception of environmental conditions and the intensity of the Sick Building Symptoms if any, at 3 levels of temperature and humidity, and 2 levels of ventilation rate.
The conclusion is that working conditions improved when subjects worked at slightly lower levels of air temperature and humidity.

In that study, two air supply devices were investigated in order to simulate the characteristic of natural wind. The paper demontrates that the simulated natural air movement had an acceptability, for the subjects exposed, higher than the artificial air movement. With simulated natural air movement comfort may improve with energy saving in warm climates.

In this paper the methodological benefits and constraints of conventional climate chamber research in comparison to the field-based alternative are discussed. The discussion of methodology is extended to the discipline of environmental psychology and with a questionning on how engineers have come to dominate a research topic that falls so clearly within the scope of psychology.

This paper, on the basis of existing literature, sums up the factors that influence the human perception of air movement and it also tries to specify in general terms when air movement is desirable and when it is not.

This paper sums up the knowledge on good and bad effects of ventilation on health and other human responses. The focus is on working environment in offices and residential buildings.

New methods were used for that study, to evaluate the factors affecting productivity. Parameters of fatigue were investigated along with task performance.

In this paper the assessment of moderately cold environments with two different methods : the PMV method and the IREQ method. The applicability of the comfort criteria is analyzed too for a more general assessment of cold environments.

It is often discussed about the possibilities that more efficient windows offer to reduce the energy loads in residential buildings. Often such results can be achieved reducing the thermal transmittance or optimising the solar gains, not so often the influence of the air permeability is taken into account. This issue is, on the contrary, very important in countries, as Italy, where the age of the building stock is accompanied by the installation of very old windows, characterised by high air leakage, which causes strong heat losses and discomfort phenomena for users.

This paper presents aspects of an office renovation project of the Social Insurance Institute (SII), the largest Social Security Organization in Greece. The project refers to small and larger SII office buildings, including various stages of intervention, ranging from the construction of new buildings, to renovation of existing buildings. Construction and electro-mechanical studies for each building were carried out in order to implement the appropriate and feasible actions.

An increasing impact of ventilation and air-conditioning to the total energy consumption of buildings has drawn attention to natural ventilation and passive cooling. The very common way of natural ventilation in residential buildings is passive stack ventilation. The passive stack ventilation relies on the stack effect created by the temperature difference between air temperature inside and outside a building.