English

The aim of this paper is to investigate the influence of the selective ventilation in the thermal performance of modern naturally-ventilated houses built in the 1950’s and 1960’s in Goiânia, located in middle-west of Brazil. The selective ventilation is one of the passive thermal conditioning strategies recommended for buildings located in this city, in the summer.

Reliable airtightness data is needed to calculate the estimate of air infiltration and the thermal loads for building energy efficiency and indoor comfort. While useful information on air leakage in low-rise dwellings does exist, there is little data available on dwellings in increasing high-rise residential buildings (particularly ones with central core plan). In this paper, we conducted airtightness measurement using fan pressurization method for about 350 dwellings in 4 high-rise residential buildings in Korea.

Natural ventilation is increasingly considered a promising solution to improve thermal comfort in buildings, including schools. However in order to support its planning and implementation, quantitative analysis on airflow paths and heat-airflow building interactions are needed. This requires an adequate accounting of both internal effects, from building layout and structure, and external forcings from atmospheric factors.

Air quality in offices depends on the ventilation system ability to remove contaminants from the occupied zone. In a low polluted building air quality mainly depends on the human presence and carbon dioxide is normally used as indicator of human bioeffluents.

Despite a lot of Integrated Design Process guidelines and procedures have been developed in the last few years, more specific energy design procedures are needed to push the implementation of passive design techniques.

This article deals with summer comfort and room air distribution in low-energy housings. In such buildings, the efficient thermal insulation and air tightness make it crucial to efficiently dispose of the heat released by the internal gains. In this prospect, the comfort in a test room resulting from an integrated cooling and ventilation system is assessed both experimentally and numerically. The air is supplied into the room close to the ceiling through a wall-mounted diffuser of complex geometry composed of 12 lobed nozzles.

Diffuse ceiling ventilation is a novel air distribution device that combines the suspended acoustic ceiling with ventilation supply. A diffuse ceiling distributes the supply air above the acoustic tiles and has proven performance in laboratory experiments. To study the performance in real conditions a classroom was retrofitted with mechanical ventilation and a diffuse ceiling. The employed ceiling comprises active panels penetrable to air and impenetrable passive panels.

The stock housing of England (UK) constitutes the oldest housing stocks in the world. Indeed, 63 per cent of all dwellings were built before 1960s and thus most of the people in the UK live in an old house or at least a house that is more than 50 years old. The most common dwelling types in the UK are the semi-detached and terraced houses, and particularly within deprived communities. In deprived communities, houses suffer from poor indoor conditions and building standards of energy performance.

by space and water heating. The high costs of energy are a national matter not only for their economic and environmental implications, but also because they contribute largely to a social problem, known as fuel poverty. The cost of heating the housing stock is rather high for different reasons, one of each being the heat loss through the building envelope. The thermal performance of existing buildings can be increased in two ways: by adding insulation to external fabric, and by reducing the unintended air leaks of the envelope.

French standard for airtightness measurements is NF EN 13829. It is completed by French application guide GA P50-784, to set calibration rules more precisely, among other issues. This guide was published in 2010. To answer measurers’ remaining questions, a Frequently Asked Questions web site was created by CETE de Lyon.