English

This Update examines various fire-stopping techniques that meet the intent of the National Building Code of Canada (NBC) with respect to fire resistance and that do not adversely affect the sound isolation of the wall assembly. The information is derived from the results of an industry-sponsored consortium project led by the National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction (IRC).      

The terrifying organisms that live in our ventilation systems have perfected their methods of attack, but Martyn Love thinks he might have the answer          

This latest addition to the University of East Anglia Campus cost 20 per cent less to build than a conventional building of similar proportions and uses 80 per cent less energy.

This paper deals with the simulation of VOCs concentration dispersion emitted from flooring material, with the purpose of understanding vocs emission and dispersion mechanisms. A test chamber is examined, whose flooring material emits a number of VOCs. Given the area specific ventilation rate and considering as boundary conditions experimental data for the examined compounds concentration, the dispersion of the vocs concentrations is examined, for two cases, steady state conditions and transient state conditions.

In the frame work of IBA Task XIII, a pilot project URBAN VILLA has been realized in Amstelveen, The Netherlands, Ref. /1/. This project concerns the development of an apartment building of 42 luxurious apartments, of which 16 will have extreme low energy consumption. Success and failure of every new domestic design are ruled by the sensation of comfort, experienced by the residents. Therefore, in order to make this a successful project comfort requirements should be fulfilled.

In order to understand why Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery is common in some countries of Europe yet installed in a small minority of domestic dwellings in the UK, surveys of Regional Electricity Companies and distributors have been carried out to identify whether there are grants available to promote the system in the UK and what influences sales of the system across Europe. A review of other heat recovery systems is provided to assess whether they are competitiors.