energy

A field study of the thermal comfort of workers in natural ventilated office buildings in Oxford and Aberdeen, UK, was carried out which included information about use of building controls. The data were analysed to explore that what effect the outdoor temperature has on the indoor temperature and how this is affected by occupants' use of environmental controls during the peak summer (June-August). The proportion of subjects using a control was related to indoor and outdoor temperatures to demonstrate the size of the effect.

The main purpose of buildings is to provide a comfortable living environment for their occupants. This includes, among others, thermal,visual and acoustic comfort as well as indoor air quality. Except during the 1950's and 1960's, it has always been considered important that an excess use of energy should be avoided in the construction and the management of a building, sometimes even at the cost of user comfort. Energy saving is, however, not the main purpose of the building.

Pocket sized summary of key energy data. Contains timely, clearly presented data on the supply, transformation and consumption of all major energy sources.

Highly-glazed spaces are attractive in many ways (solar heating, aesthetics, etc.), however, their thermal behaviour remains difficult to predict. In such spaces, the assumptions or methods generally used in building thermal simulation tools - e.g. homogeneous air temperature in the room, simplified calculations of radiative heat transfer between walls, absence of airflow modelling within the room - do not seem appropriate. We have developed a new model (AIRGLAZE) to improve the prediction of the thermal behaviour of large highly glazed spaces.

Environmental and economic concerns linked to conventional heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems (HY AC) have sparked a renewed interest in natural ventilation, passive cooling and other low energy microclimate control strategies for buildings. In Canada, the combination of extreme weather conditions, wind variability, transient occupancy patterns and high internal heat gains may hinder the feasibility of implementing natural ventilation as an exclusive means of ventilating non-domestic buildings.