PR2012

From January 1st 2013 on, the French energy performance regulation will demand that the airtightness level is justified and that airtightness of a building should be below 0,6m3/h/m² at 4Pa for single family housing and 1m3/h/m² for multi-family dwellings, resulting into an important growth in the airtightness market. It is the role of the State to accompany this market evolution and to supervise the quality of airtightness measurements used for the EP calculation. This is why it has been decided that there are two possibilities to justify the airtightness level of a building.

The efficiency of air-to-air heat recovery ventilation units is of great importance for EP calculations (energy performance of buildings) throughout Europe. Efficiencies compared on a reliable basis are also crucial for contractors and installers of such systems.

DIN 4108-7 requires a limit of q50 ≤ 3.0 m³/m²h for the air permeability of large buildings. Even stricter limits with respect to q50 can be found at DGNB [German Sustainable Building Council] and in the Swiss MINERGIE Standard.
It is the objective of this presentation to develop awareness of this topic in the audience and to give recommendations as to which limits can be applied to new building projects.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of the selective ventilation in the thermal performance of modern naturally-ventilated houses built in the 1950’s and 1960’s in Goiânia, located in middle-west of Brazil. The selective ventilation is one of the passive thermal conditioning strategies recommended for buildings located in this city, in the summer.

Reliable airtightness data is needed to calculate the estimate of air infiltration and the thermal loads for building energy efficiency and indoor comfort. While useful information on air leakage in low-rise dwellings does exist, there is little data available on dwellings in increasing high-rise residential buildings (particularly ones with central core plan). In this paper, we conducted airtightness measurement using fan pressurization method for about 350 dwellings in 4 high-rise residential buildings in Korea.

Natural ventilation is increasingly considered a promising solution to improve thermal comfort in buildings, including schools. However in order to support its planning and implementation, quantitative analysis on airflow paths and heat-airflow building interactions are needed. This requires an adequate accounting of both internal effects, from building layout and structure, and external forcings from atmospheric factors.

Air quality in offices depends on the ventilation system ability to remove contaminants from the occupied zone. In a low polluted building air quality mainly depends on the human presence and carbon dioxide is normally used as indicator of human bioeffluents.

Despite a lot of Integrated Design Process guidelines and procedures have been developed in the last few years, more specific energy design procedures are needed to push the implementation of passive design techniques.

This article deals with summer comfort and room air distribution in low-energy housings. In such buildings, the efficient thermal insulation and air tightness make it crucial to efficiently dispose of the heat released by the internal gains. In this prospect, the comfort in a test room resulting from an integrated cooling and ventilation system is assessed both experimentally and numerically. The air is supplied into the room close to the ceiling through a wall-mounted diffuser of complex geometry composed of 12 lobed nozzles.

Diffuse ceiling ventilation is a novel air distribution device that combines the suspended acoustic ceiling with ventilation supply. A diffuse ceiling distributes the supply air above the acoustic tiles and has proven performance in laboratory experiments. To study the performance in real conditions a classroom was retrofitted with mechanical ventilation and a diffuse ceiling. The employed ceiling comprises active panels penetrable to air and impenetrable passive panels.