26 March 2024, Webinar – Exploring window opening behaviour for optimal cooling and thermal comfort

Occupants use windows to control their thermal comfort and indoor air quality (IAQ). However, occupants often have to make a compromise between thermal, acoustic and visual comfort, IAQ and energy use for space conditioning. Moreover, they are not only looking for good indoor environmental quality, but also for their needs for security and privacy.

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21 March 2024, Webinar – Design and performance assessment of Ventilative Cooling

Ventilative cooling emerges to be a key element in the strategy to meet the cooling demand in buildings while cutting the CO2 emissions. Ventilative cooling also enhances thermal comfort and mitigates heat stress in buildings. Despite these benefits, the practical adoption of ventilative cooling remains limited among designers. There is still a need for design guidelines and assessment methods in standard weather conditions, extreme scenarios (such as heat waves) and urban environments.

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9 December 2020, Webinar – Resilient Ventilative Cooling in practice

The current development in building energy efficiency towards nZEB buildings represents a number of new challenges to design and construction. One of these major challenges is the increased need for cooling in these highly insulated and airtight buildings, which is not only present in the summer period but also in the shoulder seasons and in offices even in midwinter. Resilient ventilative cooling can be an energy efficient solution to address this cooling challenge in buildings.

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AIVC 2023 Conference Proceedings now available!

We are happy to announce that the book of proceedings, PowerPoint presentations and individual papers from the AIVC 2023 conference "Ventilation, IEQ and health in sustainable buildings" held on 4-5 October 2023, in Copenhagen, Denmark are now available to download freely.

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Ventilation, IEQ and health in sustainable buildings (Book of Proceedings)

The Book of Proceedings of the 43rd AIVC - 11th TightVent - 9th venticool Conference: "Ventilation, IEQ and health in sustainable buildings" held in Copenhagen, Denmark on 4-5 October 2023.

Ventilation, IEQ and health in sustainable buildings (Slides)

The Presentations at the 43rd AIVC - 11th TightVent - 9th venticool Conference: "Ventilation, IEQ and health in sustainable buildings" held in Copenhagen, Denmark on 4-5 October 2023.

A survey of building design practitioner perceptions of ventilative cooling in their building design processes

Buildings account for 40% of EU energy consumption and 36% of the energy related greenhouse gas emissions at present. Consequently, the net zero target set by Energy Performance of Building’s Directive by 2050 for building stock is ambitious to achieve. The often default design choice to adopt mechanical cooling in non-domestic buildings highlights the lack of robust decision support tools or frameworks available to designers to properly evaluate ventilative cooling as a realistic alternative.

A methodology for evaluating the ventilative cooling potential in early-stage building design

As a result of the new initiatives and regulations towards nearly zero energy buildings, designers are more frequently exploiting the cooling potential of the climate to reduce overheating and improve indoor well-being of people. At early stage of design, climate analysis is particularly useful for determining the most cost-effective passive cooling methods, such as ventilative cooling. However, besides the external climate conditions, building energy uses are characterized by occupancy pattern and needs, envelope characteristics and internal loads.

Design procedures for ventilative cooling integrated in new standards

Low energy buildings are highly insulated and airtight and therefore subject to overheating risks, where Ventilative Cooling (VC) could be a relevant solution in both existing and new buildings - being both a sustainable and energy efficient solution to improve indoor well-being, hereunder thermal comfort (State-of-the-art-review, Kolokotroni et al., 2015).
VC is widely used as a key element when designing buildings to cope with overheating to assist improving thermal comfort, but can also improve the Indoor Air Quality due to higher ventilation rates in the cooling season.

Lessons Learned from Irish Schools: Early-stage Insights on Overheating

Overheating in school buildings is likely to lead to a negative learning performance experience for occupants in these settings. In Ireland, school buildings are primarily naturally ventilated, given the relative increases in external mean temperatures that are projected to have negative effects on the potential of natural ventilative cooling going forward, it is important to assess what the current overheating status is in these buildings. Existing work has already highlighted the lack of measurement data on overheating in low energy school buildings.

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