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Field measurements of the thermal performance of five low cost houses in Malaysia were carried out. Thermal simulation tests were performed on two of the houses, a traditional Malay village house, and a modem urban Cluster-Link house. "Me measured and the modelled results were found to agree, indicating a significantly higher overnight internal temperature in the modem house compared to the traditional house. The model was then used to predict the thermal performance of a new design low cost house, which was shown to perform similarly to the traditional house type.

A new energy efficiency code for nonresidential buildings is being developed in Canada. This code will have three compliance paths for building envelope requirements-simple prescriptive tables, a trade off procedure, and whole-building energy performance modelling. A simple means of estimating the relationship between building envelope characteristics and energy consumption was needed both for economic analyses to select prescriptive envelope values, and as the basic energy model for tradeoff compliance software.

Building designers are increasing their use of computer software to more effectively take advantage of analytical tools that are useful to the design process. The area of energy analysis, though developing for twenty years or more, is still not effectively integrated into the conceptual design process. Too often, energy Performance is evaluated as an after thought or it is done only for compliance to local energy codes.

A new service has been developed to assist new home?builders to examine the design options with a view to improving the energy efficiency and comfort of their new home. The service combines the skills of a trained advisor with versatility of a new computer package that enables thermal evaluation of the options within a one hour consultation. The developments that make this possible are described.

A set of statistical regression equations was developed to predict relative heating and cooling loads of external zones of commercial buildings. The equations were derived from the coil loads predicted by several thousand DOE-2 simulations.

The topic of this paper is the use of low temperature air (40 F or 5 C) for room cooling. Cold air systems can offer energy and space savings relative to higher temperature cooling systems. As the supply temperature and flowrate are reduced, considerations such as adequate flowrate, jet dumping or separation, condensation on duct walls, and decreased relative humidity become increasingly important. Cold air jet separation from the ceiling can be a problem resulting in unacceptable thermal discomfort in the occupied zone.

In this paper, we develop a discrete approach to describe the transport of condensible vapors through a microporous substance. We consider only isothermal water migration under uniform atmospheric air pressure, at temperature lower than 100C with negligible gravity. The pore-structure which is supposed to be representative of the material is built on a 2D random network of tubes. The basic phenomena (adsorption/desorption, diffusion, condensation) that occur during the water vapor transport in a single cylindrical pore at the steady state are taken into account.

With the accelerating use of building performance prediction models in a design context, the need for comprehensive program accreditation procedures is becoming more pressing. This paper recognises the importance of the validation component of such a procedure and makes a case for containing much of the present knowledge about validation within an interactive facility centred on test cells.

A "detailed" model of a heat emitter in hot water circulation has been developed considering, two phases (liquid and metal), the non linear heat transfer and the enthalpy transport by the fluid. A reduced order state model ( order two or three) has been then formed, linearising the initial "detailed" model and using a model reduction technique developed in our laboratory which is especially based on modal analysis. The simulated results from both the models for a step input of the inlet temperature have been presented and discussed.

Currently, building energy analysis programs employ models of fluorescent lighting systems which are much oversimplified and potentially inaccurate. One important factor neglected by all whole-building programs is the variation of lamp power and light output with lamp wall temperature. This means that the lighting component of zone load and artificial lighting levels are both calculated incorrectly. Additionally, the latter implies that the predicted energy saving for systems that automatically reduce artificial lighting when daylight is available is also incorrect.