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Powerhouse Telemark is a low carbon plus energy project in Porsgrunn, Norway. The building is currently in a commissioning phase, but with most of the building under normal operation. The heating and cooling of the building is primarily done by a low temperature radiant floor heating system which is reversed in summer and used for high temperature cooling. The low temperature heating is provided by a geothermal heat pump and the high temperature cooling is provided by free cooling from the energy wells.

Our planet is rapidly urbanizing, leading to significant biodiversity loss. In architecture and urban planning, public and private developers are beginning to integrate vegetation into built environments such as green roofs, urban farms, and bioremediation systems, in some cases designed as novel additions to mechanical systems. In indoor environments, investigations into active biofilters for improving Indoor Air Quality have been investigated for several decades.

Air leakage in a rotary heat recovery device in air handling unit (AHU) was studied by a laboratory experiment. The experiment tested a commercial AHU with rotary heat recovery and equipped with various leakage control techniques, e.g. Automatic Leakage Control (ALCTM), rotor speed control (RSC) and purge sector, etc. In the test, exhaust air transfer ratio (EATR ) of the AHU was measured by tracer gas method at two levels of airflow rates in both constant airflow and constant pressure operation modes of the test AHU.

Trends in home heating and cooling in the US are resulting in less mixing of air within dwellings, either due to not using central forced air systems, or to reduced loads and runtimes in high performance homes. This study examined the use of zoned ventilation systems using a coupled CONTAM/EnergyPlus model of new California dwellings, including a 1-story single-family dwelling and a single apartment unit. Zoned and unzoned ventilation systems were simulated for exhaust, supply and balanced fan types.

Overheating has become a recurring problem in airtight and highly insulated buildings even in moderate climates. This study aims to analyze thermal comfort and thermal resilience in an office building during summer and mid-seasons by means of dynamic simulations. Thermal comfort assessment shows, this office building without improvements has a ‘good’ indoor climate for 79.6% of total occupied hours.

The ongoing covid-19 pandemic has drawn the attention on the importance of providing adequate fresh air to the occupants of the built environment, in particular in educational buildings. Higher ventilation rates and personal protection devices like facial masks are among the strategies and procedures to reduce the infection risk, allowing the fruition of school spaces despite the epidemic progression. Nevertheless, the problem of airborne transmission has been usually dealt with considering each environment alone and assuming steady state conditions.

Nowadays, many countries include requirements for building airtightness in their current national regulations or energy-efficiency programs, mainly for concern about reducing building energy consumption due to air leakage. Moreover, some countries impose a mandatory justification with an air leakage measurement. Therefore, the uncertainty of the measurement results has become a key concern in several countries over the past year. More specifically, the influence of wind speed has been identified as one of the major sources of error on the measurement result.

Indoor air quality (IAQ) plays an intrinsic role in occupant comfort, and should be evaluated as a key building performance indicator of early design phases. However, IAQ is very complex due to a plethora of chemical compounds in the indoor air and also depends on the activities in the building. Therefore, IAQ assessment is often not comprehensively considered, or applied only during late project phases. This study reviewed how Building Information Modeling (BIM) could be applied for IAQ performance analysis, to provide a more holistic design process.

In order to reduce the primary energy consumption of buildings, highly efficient heat recovery of the HVAC system is indispensable. A reduction of the fresh air rate is not advisable; Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is essential for the health and wellbeing of the user. In order to nullify the additional pressure loss of the heat recovery unit a mechanical ventilation system is needed.

Industrial kitchens have high HVAC load requirements due to high exhaust rates from hoods. Especially in cold climates to heat the makeup air in winter requires high initial and - more importantly - high operating costs. Heat recovery always looks like an attractive alternative due to the high temperatures of hood exhaust air. However, since hood exhaust is quite dirty, heat recovery sections are clogged very fast. Heat recovery systems are established in six restaurants in Ankara, Turkey.