English

This paper presents an analysis of the resilience to climate change of a direct adiabatic cooling system integrated within an industrial building. The system is a solution that utilizes humidified porous material to lower the air temperature without requiring external energy. In this study, the system is evaluated for two typical climate periods (historical and future) for a Mediterranean climate, using indicators of energy performance, thermal comfort and water consumption.

The global rise in average outdoor air temperatures has led to a significant increase in the demand for cooling energy in recent years. The development of resilient air-cooling systems capable of handling extreme heat events is essential to achieve the aim of Nearly Zero Energy Buildings. Ventilative cooling technologies based on indirect evaporative cooling systems are considered a sustainable solution in terms of indoor air quality and energy performance. 

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant emphasis on improving indoor air quality (IAQ), particularly within hospital buildings. Despite developments in integrated central advanced mechanical ventilation and filtration technologies in new hospital buildings, challenges persist in installing them in existing and old hospital buildings relying on traditional natural ventilation.

The global demand to improve the energy performance of buildings has led to greater air tightness and uncertainty in the ability of natural ventilation to maintain adequate indoor environmental quality. A monitoring campaign was carried out to evaluate the long-term indoor environmental quality across a year-long period in energy-efficient Irish dwellings.

The research exposes a critical feedback loop: the building sector's high energy consumption and emissions contribute significantly to climate change.  Warming temperatures, in turn, lead to increased reliance on energy-intensive HVAC systems, further exacerbating the problem. 

Ensuring thermal comfort in air traffic control towers (ATCTs) is paramount, given the exacting demands of air traffic control, which require heightened levels of concentration and vigilance. ATCTs feature extensive glazed surfaces, leading to significant solar gains and heat loss within the indoor environment. To maintain thermally comfortable conditions throughout the year, air conditioning systems are employed to regulate the indoor climate, adjusting for varying thermal load.

Building airtightness is of foremost importance because of its impact on global energy consumption, but also on occupant’s comfort, dimensioning of ventilation systems, hygrothermal behaviour, fire safety, etc. This building characteristic is usually measured with the fan pressurization method, following ISO 9972:2015 standard. This method requires to assume that the pressure difference due to wind and stack effect, called the zero-flow pressure difference, is constant during the test and that its value is the average of pre- and post-test measurements. This 

Controlling air infiltration is crucial to ensure thermal comfort, optimal performance of ventilation systems, and the overall energy efficiency of buildings. The quantification of the overall airtightness of the building envelope, often conducted through pressurization tests, has been widely used. In addition, IR thermography is a valuable complementary tool for identifying and locating air leakage paths.  

Buildings energy renovation is a major priority in most European countries in order to achieve a fully decarbonized building stock by 2050. In France, 7 million homes are poorly insulated and 14% of French people feel cold in their homes. The government has thus implemented an ambitious plan to scale up energy-efficient renovations of buildings to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 while also pursuing a social objective of combating energy precarity. 

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, e.g., air handling units (AHUs), play a key role in modern building energy systems (BES) as they account for a high share of the energy usage, e.g., 30 % within the U.S. commercial building sector. Unfortunately, many faults occur during the operation of AHUs leading to higher energy usage and the need for expert personnel monitoring the according plants. The latter is a time-consuming task and is assisted by fault detection systems nowadays.