English

Due to the negative effects of Particulate Matter exposure, more and more inexpensive optical aerosol spectrometers and photometers (low-cost PM sensors) are coming to the market, which are often used to monitor air quality. In addition to the low acquisition costs, these commercial PM sensors are characterized by low maintenance effort, which enable very high data availability in continuous operation. However, questions about the quality of the generated data often remain unanswered.

Unintended Infiltration in buildings is responsible for a significant portion of the global housing stock energy demand. Today, the fan pressurization method, also known as blower-door test, is the most frequently used measurement method to evaluate the airtightness of buildings and determining the total air change rate of a building or a building element. However, the localization and quantification of single leaks in the building envelope remain difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, an acoustic method is introduced to estimate the leakage size of single leaks in buildings.

Building simulations are used to investigate building performance and design the building systems optimally. In particular, the air exchange between zonesand with the environment has a pivotal role inmodernventilation system design. Nevertheless, the model of the airflow becomes difficult for the modeler, motivated by the complexity of the grid that has to be modeled. IDEAS, a Modelica library, includes components for thermal multi-zone models of buildings as well as models for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and other elements that interact in the same model.

Indoor environment quality has been researched extensively, with many countries adopting regulations to ensure that building occupants enjoy healthy working environments. In many small island developing states (SIDS), such as Mauritius, the population benefits from perfect weather conditions, but building design considerations often under-estimate the effects of outdoor weather conditions, heat and pollutant emission, illumination and noise, which worsen indoor environment.

Unintended airflow through building envelopes leads to an increased demand in heating and cooling energy. The most common way to measure air leakage of buildings is the blower door test, which quantifies the overall leakage rate of one room or a building. To reduce air leakage and associated energy loss in new and existing buildings, it is necessary to identify leak locations and prioritize sealing of more substantial leaks.

The occupants’ satisfaction with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of a building is a key factor to determine if the indoor climate can be considered as acceptable. Current standards, evaluating the IEQ, do not always guarantee sufficiently high occupant satisfaction levels, since these standards do not handle all satisfaction influencing parameters, such as, personal preferences or perceived control. Therefore, the assessment of occupant satisfaction with the IEQ remains an important issue.

This paper describes the ongoing development of a new tracer gas test (TGT) for total air change rates measurement. This new TGT, intended for use in large-scale IAQ assessments and based on constant tracer injection, employs an alternative tracer gas that is more adequate than the currently employed SF6 and perfluorocarbons and that can be co-captured and co-analyzed along with commonly assessed VOCs using a commercial passive IAQ sampler. Via literature study and lab testing, decane-D22 was found to be a suitable tracer substance.

Recently, understanding thermal comfort management enabled the scientific community to broaden its research towards smart device set-ups, in order to further reduce energy consumption and thermal comfort satisfaction. Thus, the need to minimize user interaction and implement prediction functions has arisen. In this work, the development of a smart thermostat is presented. The procedure is divided into three basic stages: calibration, development of energy saving and thermal comfort routines, and comparison with a conventional thermostat’s operation.

Cooling in high ambient temperature (HAT) countries is a major energy consumer. In Kuwait, 70% of the electricity generated is consumed on cooling residential and commercial buildings. Because of the extreme temperatures in the summer, which can reach 50℃, outdoor fresh air vents are closed because AC units are incapable of cooling air at such elevated temperatures. Consequently, this has significantly reduced indoor air quality (IAQ) in residential and commercial buildings for indoor occupants.

In future building regulations, building performance is going to be extended to global performance, including indoor air quality (IAQ). In the energy performance (EP) field, successive regulations pushed for a "performance-based" approach, based on an energy consumption requirement at the design stage. Nevertheless, ventilation regulations throughout the world are still mostly based on prescriptive approaches, setting airflows requirements.