ventilation

In 2011, the Danish Energy Agency initiated a study into ventilation solutions for the retrofit of schools to identify the most promising technologies. The reason was an increasing awareness that the ability of school children to absorb, adapt and use knowledge was affected negatively by inadequate ventilation rates. This paper presents an output of this study. A method for evaluation of the ventilation systems is proposed. The method consists of three categories with a clear separation to create a scoring board that facilitates transparent and unbiased evaluation.

Ventilation’s historical goal has been to ensure sufficient air change rates in buildings from a hygienic point of view. Regarding its potential impact on energy consumption, ventilation is being reconsidered today. An important challenge for low energy buildings lies in the need to master airflows through the building envelope. Data collected from controls in 1287 recent dwellings shows us that 68 % of the dwellings don't respect the French airing regulation.

Controlling indoor humidity is important in homes, because high indoor humidity is associated with occupant health and building durability issues. Ventilation is often used to avoid peaks of moisture in homes, such as in kitchens and bathrooms. However, in hot-humid climates, outdoor air can have higher humidity than indoors, and continuous whole house ventilation can lead to increases in indoor humidity levels.

Indoor carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have played a role in discussions of ventilation and indoor air quality (IAQ) since the 18th century. Those discussions have evolved over the years to focus on the impacts of CO2 concentrations on building occupants, how these concentrations relate to occupant perception of bioeffluents, the use of indoor CO2 concentrations to estimate ventilation rates, and CO2–based demand control ventilation. This paper reviews how indoor CO2 has been dealt with in ventilation and IAQ standards in the context of these issues.

This paper presents a comparison of Indoor Air Quality in several buildings constructed prior to the implementation of the new Spanish regulation on thermal installations (RITE, 2007 modified on 2013) and some new ones that fully accomplish the requirements of this new regulation.

Choosing the right baseline level of ventilation has a big impact in the calculated energy needs of buildings.

The north of the Iberian Peninsula is characterized by a high level of humidity during the summer.

Recently research at the Eduardo Torroja Institute for construction sciences proposes a new wording for the IAQ regulations for dwellings included in the Spanish Building Code.
The main goal of the earlier research was to adapt required ventilation rates to real needs to achieve a reduction of ventilation rates and energy demand with no negative impact on indoor air quality.

The Spanish Building Code (BC) regulates indoor air quality (IAQ) requirements in dwellings by establishing threshold continuous flow rates according to the occupancy, use of the rooms and their usable area. The implementation of this threshold flow allow adequate IAQ.
A revised IAQ requirement have been proposed. These new requirement quantifies the IAQ as a function of CO2 concentration which means an non continuous flow rates ventilation systems will be able to be used.

Ventilation in low energy refurbished buildings is the cause of a big part of energy losses. In order to reduce this impact, some energy regulations prescribe a solution (such as the Swiss energy Law, prescribing heat recovery) and others prescribe a system global performance (such as the EU delegated regulations No 1254 and 1253 /  2004 determining a global energy performance label of the ventilation system).