Increased ventilation airflow rate: night and day cooling of an office building.

This study aims at evaluating the energetical benefits of increased ventilation airflow rate tocool buildings. Different operating modes have been tested :- increased ventilation airflow rate during the night to take advantage of the building thermalcapacity to cool it,- increased ventilation airflow rate during night and day when the outside air temperature islower than the inside air temperature.This three-year study (from 1994 to 1996) has been carried out in 4 steps :1) bibliographic study to learn results of studies already led in this field;2) experimental phase on a real building in La Rochelle (France);3) experimental phase on a real building in Chambery (France);4) parametric study by numerical simulation.This paper concerns only the 3rd step of the global study : the experimental phase inChambery. This experimental study consisted in implementing different working scenarios ofincreased ventilation airflow rate (up to 10 vol/h) during night and day on a office building.The experiments were carried out during summers 1995 and 1996 and gave us usefulinformation to optimize increased ventilation airflow rate working scenarios, such as :- solar impact on efficiency,- working periods in night and day, - control based on difference between outside air temperature and inside air temperature, - potential energy savings with regard to energy consumption of the fans.