English

The installed performance of cooking exhaust fans was evaluated through residential field experiments conducted on a sample of 15 devices varying in design and other characteristics.

Cooking and cooking burners emit pollutants that can adversely affect indoor air quality in residences and significantly impact occupant health. Effective kitchen exhaust ventilation can reduce exposure to cooking-related air pollutants as an enabling step to healthier, low-energy homes. This report identifies barriers to the widespread adoption of kitchen exhaust ventilation technologies and practice and proposes a suite of strategies to overcome these barriers.

The main airflow and contaminant paths or the spatial distribution of the age of air (or contaminant) in a room are of great interest in estimating venrilation efficiency. A simple meusurement method is presented which consists of injecting one or more tracer gases at locations of interest and analysing the concentration at several other locations, carefully chosen for best accuracy.Response functions can be fitted to these measurements, which are the age of the tracers or of the air or the concentration of the tracers as a function of the location.

For the past 50 years, a wide variety of building energy simulation programs have been developed, enhanced and are in use throughout the building energy community. This paper is an overview of a report which provides up-to-date comparison of the features and capabilities of twenty major building energy simulation programs.

Implementation of the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) introduced the first legal airtightness regulations into the 2008 Polish Building Codes. Unfortunately these provisions are currently not sufficiently precise or developed in relation to testing procedures to ensure appropriate airtightness. Generally there is a low level of awareness, experience and knowledge among architects, designers, investors, contractors and there are no certification requirements imposed for measurement companies.

Airtight construction lies at the heart of achieving high energy performance in dwellings. But how well does it apply in new construction? This paper presents results from airtightness measurements on 44 randomly selected, standard new built single family houses in Belgium and from 4 case studies including 78 additional measurements. The houses were randomly selected after completion, to assure that standard workmanship was used during construction.

As strategies for improving building envelope and HVAC equipment efficiencies are increasingly required to reduce building energy use, a greater percentage of energy loss will occur through building envelope leakage. Although the energy impacts of unintended infiltration on a building's energy use can be significant, current energy simulation software and design methods are generally not able to accurately account for envelope infiltration and the impacts of improved airtightness.

Although standards for single-zone air leakage tests are widely used, there are no existing standards for several multi-zone cases including: 1) testing air leakage between adjacent zones or 2) testing leakage to the outside from a single unit in a multi-zone building. While a range of test procedures have been used to determine inter-zone leakage using fan-pressurization, the accuracy of the methods can vary significantly. Using field measurements and simulations, we compared the uncertainty in the leakage between two adjacent zones for different measurement and calculation methods.

This paper describes two recent applications of aerosol sealing techniques in buildings for improving indoor air quality and reducing energy required for heating, cooling, and ventilation. One application applies a commercially-available duct sealing technology, which has typically been used in single-family applications, to large-building exhaust systems. The initial leakage rates, percent leakage sealed, and issues encountered are presented for several large buildings.

In 1998, NIST published a review of commercial and institutional building airtightness data that found significant levels of air leakage and debunked the "myth" of the airtight commercial building (Persily, 1998). Since then, NIST has expanded and maintained a database of whole building envelope leakage measurements of U.S. commercial and institutional buildings.