Energy saving and indoor air quality in office buildings

Air quality in the office room areas, as well as their energy demands for heating and cooling are directly depended on the ventilation levels in those rooms. Specifically, high internal air quality requires high levels of ventilation and therefore high energy demands. On the other hand, high energy savings can be accomplished by full building impermeability, which means low to none ventilation and at the same time low air quality. Those observations were determined from studying the effect of natural air flow in energy preservation at an extant building with office complexes, specifically the K2 building which is part of the Environmental Engineering Department at the Technical University of Crete. The building’s thermal behaviour was examined using a modelling program called TRNsys, whereas the use of a tool named COMIS allowed the modelling of air flow inside the building as well as estimating the inner pollution derived from the employees