cold climate

A demonstration house was previously built and commissioned in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada. The purpose of the overall effort is to evaluate the performance of a high-performance building located in the Canadian Arctic, while considering the unique social, economic and logistical challenges associated with its remote location. Previous work consisted of monitoring and reporting on the energy consumption due to heating between April 2016 and April 2017.

The extremes of arctic climate pose severe challenges on housing ventilation systems, energy consumption and demand for space heating for northern remote community residential buildings. As a part of the overall effort to reduce space heating requirements, dwellings are built air tight to reduce heat losses. However, airtight homes require energy efficient and effective ventilation systems to maintain acceptable indoor air quality and comfort, and to protect the building envelope from moisture damage.

The GK environmental house is the first office building in Norway built according to the passive house concept. In such buildings, it is crucial to develop a ventilation strategy to reduce the energy use outside of the operating time. An optimal operating strategy has been developed for cold days, when the outdoor temperature falls well below 0 °C, which is presented in this paper. Indeed, these conditions correspond to the largest heat loss.

In this article we compare to ventilation strategies to heat a “passive house” office building using only the ventilation system. Two ventilation strategies with supply air temperature above and below the current room temperature were compared through a cross over experiment. A questionnaire was used to measure the perceived health and well being. Both strategies documented very good indoor climate with highly positive scores on the questionnaire.

Measurements were performed in a test room at SINTEF building and infrastructure, Oslo. The test room is 16 m2 and built according to NS-EN 442-2.  Measurements of various air flow rates (9 l/s, 18 l/s, 34 l/s and 50 l/s) and different supply air temperatures (2, 4, 6 and 10 degrees over room temperature) were performed. Tracer gas (SF6) measurements were performed to evaluate ventilation effectiveness and age of air in occupied zone.

This paper presents the development of a computer model of an academic building using the EnergyPlus program and its calibration with monitored data. The new Concordia Sciences Building (CSB), located in Montreal, has a total floor area of 32,000 m2. The size and the complexity of the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and heat recovery systems make the modeling process a challenge and an excellent opportunity to evaluate the capabilities and features of EnergyPlus in this particular context.

According to the cold climate in winter, a new novel ventilation system was put forward based on the analysis of the heat distribution at the subway station in Harbin. There was no special heating system in winter for subway station with such a ventilation system. In this paper, three dimensional model of the subway station was built, a mathematical model of the novel ventilation system was developed based on the k-ε standard turbulence model, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for the ventilation system were performed to clarify the conditions of the temperature fields.

Utilizing a cool roof is an efficient way to reduce the cooling energy use of a building. Cool roofs, however, may increase heating energy use in winter. In cold climates, during the winter the sun angle is lower, days are shorter, sky is cloudy, and most heating occur during early morning or evening hours when the solar intensity is low. In addition, the roof may be covered with snow for most of the heating season. All these lead to a lower (than what is commonly thought) winter time heating penalties for cool roofs. 

The aim of the project is to study, develop, build (prototype system) and evaluate an energy efficient demand controlled hybrid ventilation system for dwellings in a cold climate. Hybrid ventilation in a cold climate means a ventilation system with low pressure drops, which result in a minimisation of the mechanical energy for ventilation, and that natural driving forces can play an important role.

In this paper the assessment of moderately cold environments with two different methods : the PMV method and the IREQ method. The applicability of the comfort criteria is analyzed too for a more general assessment of cold environments.