English

This paper deals with the use of passive solutions to reach thermal comfort conditions in aneducational building under specific tropical climatic conditions. A case study of a green highschool building located in the French tropical island of La Reunion at an altitude of 600mwas used.

The paper discusses the newly revised ASHRAE GreenGuide, particularly as it relates to thetopic of indoor environmental quality. The updated Guide includes a new chapter on LEEDGuidance for Mechanical Engineers and a new chapter on building systems Impact on theLocal Environment- both indoor and outdoor.

The simulation of a building as a whole offers an image of its behaviour, reflecting thecomplex relation established between the outdoor environment factors, the buildingcharacteristics, the use by its occupants, and the parameters which intervene in satisfying thecomfort criteria. This paper gives an overview of the use of building simulation in Romania.It focuses on summer comfort.

In this article the concept of a new energy-efficient office building and results of a 3-year monitoring are described. The monitoring was performed within the German funding pro-gramme EnOB [1]. In this building most of the offices are naturally ventilated and passively cooled. One aspect of the passive cooling is the nocturnal ventilation operated automatically by the buildings control system. Another focus of the energy concept is on regenerative heat-ing with wooden pellets.

In the SARS epidemics in 2003, cluster of cases occurred in high-rise residential(HRR) building blocks, especially in Hong Kong, which gave rise to the concern of the possible roles of air flow. In this paper, the multiple parallel airborne transmission routes are discussed. In particular we closely investigated one of the most likely virus-spread paths, which is related to single-side ventilation air flow through open windows caused by buoyancy effects.

Within the Polish - Norwegian project SUREBILD (Sustainable Redevelopment of Buildings) special attention was paid to find the economically feasible technologies that might improve current poor indoor air quality in Polish schools. Detailed analysis has been performed for selected primary school including different scenarios of modernization of ineffective passive stack ventilation system. The results indicated that hybrid ventilation was the most interesting option from energy point of view.

In the context of current promotion of Distributed Generation (DG), micro Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems for single or small ensembles of (residential) buildings are seen advantageous to combine both decentralized generation and rather high overall efficiency. The latter presupposes intelligent management strategies which have to mediate between energy cost minimization and user comfort aspects.

Multi-energy sources, for heating and cooling purposes, are considered to have a large potential in contributing to the penetration of renewable energy sources for domestic, building and industrial applications. But it requires that conventional heating and cooling systems have to be adapted or changed for incorporating renewable energy sources. Nowadays, the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning industries are the actors which have access to the market, and they provide services using mainly fossil fuels or electricity as energy sources.

The district heating system should be accepted as a technical system, functionally and workable to provide heat for thermo technical needs of a higher number of different and connected us ers being located on a wider area usually in urban environment. The thermo technical needs of users mean the needs for heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and preparation of consume sanitary hot water and/or for special purposes. The district heating system on defined quality level provides heating and its delivery to users.

New distributed simulation environment has been used to simulate the energy flows in a simple case community consisting of four buildings, power plant and a district heating network. Distributing computing task on different computers accelerates the simulation, but simultaneously some time is spent on communication. The tests indicated that a one year energy simulation of a community could be performed within 3.5-10 days of calendar time depending on the time step used. It was also found that the Internet-communication of data takes approximately 20-25 % of the total simulation time.