apartments

Airtight, highly insulated, and passively cooled buildings in the EU are designed under typical outdoor and indoor thermal conditions. With increasing risk and uncertainty with regards to climate change and associated heatwaves(HW), the design thermal performance of these buildings is not guaranteed. It is crucial to focus on improving thermal resilience to overheating and futureproof these buildings. “Thermal resilience to overheating” is the characteristic that describes the extent to which buildings and their cooling strategies can maintain habitable conditions during or post shocks.

The trend in European countries, such as Belgium, France and Germany is that the quality of the airtightness of the building envelope is getting better and better. This is true for small, airtight apartments, Passive houses and some large buildings with an excellent airtightness due to special requirements, e.g. oxygen reduction or fire protection.

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.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effects of measuring position of air-tightness performance in Flat-type and Tower-type apartments. Air-tightness performance was measured on entrance doors using the Blower Door System in accordance with CAN/CGSB 149 and on the windows using air-tightness Measuring (KNS-serise) in accordance with JIS A 2201. The air-tightness test was performed with newly builted apartments in 2011. The air-tightness test results on location were converted into ACH50 for comparison.