Survey on minimum ventilation rate of residential building in fifteen countries

The Minimum Ventilation Rate standard for dwellings is essential not only to provide occupant health and comfort, but also to remove and dilute the dominant pollutants. The purpose of this survey is to clarify and compare the regulations, standards or guidelines of ventilation requirements for residential buildings of various countries. The studies are based on the many literatures and interviews with the specialists in building regulation. The main viewpoints in this study are, how much the minimum ventilation rate is required, whether the regulations are mandatory or not, and what the ventilation requirements are based on. All regulations were applied to a model house proposed by the Architectural Institute of Japan in order to compare the minimum air change rates. The conclusions of this study are shown as follows, (1) In Sweden, Denmark, France and Japan, the regulations were confirmed to be mandatory, but in other countries, there were some obscurities. (2) In each of the regulation, the ventilation requirement was based on the total volume of houses, the conditioned volume, the floor area, people and ventilation systems etc. (3) It was found that the air change rates applied to the model house were nearly 0.5 ACH, which is equal to the Japanese requirements.