Workshops

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. Ventilative cooling can be an energy efficient solution to address this cooling challenge in buildings.

After 5 very successful editions of the Summer School on “Dynamic methods for whole building energy assessment” this time the focus will be on pragmatic application of these dynamic calculation techniques. For the practical exercises the software tool LORD will be applied on benchmark data as well as routines in the R-environment.

When and where?

The venue for the Summer School is for the second time in Granada, at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Granada and takes place from Monday 3 until Friday 7 July, 2017.

In many countries, most office buildings, and an increasing fraction of residential buildings, use mechanical cooling even when an optimized natural ventilative cooling (VC) system could meet cooling comfort and fresh air requirements. This five-day summer course will introduce students to the capabilities and limitations of VC using a design case study approach.

Indoor exposure to contaminants should be minimized to avoid adverse health and comfort effects. Experience shows that this qualitative statement is difficult to translate into measurable terms, such as performance indicators or metrics, which can be used as a basis for defining and assessing requirements in regulations and standards while holistically reflecting indoor air quality. The simplest and most commonly used approaches rely on ventilation airflow rates determined by experts or codes.

Addressing the increased potential for cooling energy demand and associated risk of overheating in new and refurbished low energy buildings is becoming an important issue for the industry. This half day seminar for researchers, designers, engineers & architects, is organised by the Cork Institute of Technology in collaboration with IEA EBC Annex 62 – Ventilative Cooling and will present state of the art in utilising ventilation for reducing cooling energy demand and addressing the risk of overheating in low energy buildings.

Although ventilation and airtightness are covered in most countries by various regulations focussed on energy performance and/or indoor air quality, the effectiveness of these regulations is often called into question. A number of studies have shown significant deviations between assumed and actual characteristics of the building or equipment, possibly resulting in non-compliance to the regulation and/or degraded performance.

This seminar will present current work by the IEA EBC Annex 62 which is an international collaborative project on ventilative cooling; it has a four year working phase (2014-2017) and contribution by representatives from 20 universities, research institutes and private industries from 14 different countries from Europe, Japan, China and the US.

The main purpose of this workshop was to present and discuss the evolutions in the national regulations related to summer comfort and cooling:

• In terms of standards for achieving good summer comfort
• For improving energy efficiency during the summer period
• Regarding building solar control
• Regarding amortisation and dissipation techniques
• Regarding night time ventilation for passive cooling
• Regarding (free) cooling techniques

Also, to reply the following questions :

The aims of the workshop: 

The energy and environmental challenges ahead of us are tremendous; a reduction of the heat flow through opaque building elements remains a top priority. This is not only the case for new buildings but even more for existing buildings. Whereas in the past insulation layers in the building envelope yielded rarely more than 100 mm of thickness, the tightening of the requirements and targets will lead to substantially thicker layers with classical insulation materials. Especially for renovation, the thickness of internal or external insulation layers becomes a major issue of concern.