English

The authors take the historic centre in Portugal as a case study. In this paper an extensive survey of building typology and materials, indoor and outdoor building damage, is presented along with measurements of indoor air temperature and relative humidity. High humidity and presence of mould have an incidence on indoor quality of life for the inhabitants.

At a point-source release, point-wise concentrations may greatly exceed the well-mixed conditions. In order to examine this assumption, aerosols have been released in a test room with HEPA filter ventilation, at different conditions of room furnishings and different contaminant release locations. The aerosol concentrations were measured simultaneously, for each experiment, at seven locations by nephelmetry.

The investigation of natural ventilation with the software package COMIS (Conjunction of Multizone Infiltration Specialists) in a typical building in Serbia was the aim of that study. Results show that a good IAQ cannot be achieved with natural ventilation by infiltration in that building during summer.

This study reveals the effects that porous residential buildings have on the natural ventilation performance and on the cooling load reduction too. Two residential building models using CFD analysis and thermal and airflow network analysis are evaluated. Results show that improvements in the natural ventilation performance would reduce the cooling load.

The examination of the effects of cross-ventilation when a porous hedge is placed ahead of a residential building is presented in this paper. For the prediction of the airflow characteristics around both the porous hedge and the building, a CFD simulation has been carried out. Results and conclusions are presented.

This study aims at checking the viability of natural ventilation in urban environment, especially in street canyons. Reduced wind velocity, urban heat island, noise, pollution are barriers for a natural ventilation in town. The effects of those barriers have been quantified and the models developed can be used in the initial stages of building design , mainly in street canyons.

The differences and similarities between natural and mechanical wind in built environment are the subject of this paper. In that aim, a spectral analysis is applied to study the natural and mechanical wind characteristics in different conditions. In the end, the influence of spectral characteristics on human sensation for airflow are presented.

CFD has been applied to calculate the flow in a kitchen hood system at operating conditions. Fluent code was used to solve the governing equations (mass, momentum, energy and turbulence).The predicted characteristics curves of the hood ventilator and load coefficients appear to be in good agreement with the experimental data.

During winter 2000-2001, a field study was performed to investigate the thermal environment and the thermal comfort in residential buildings in Harbin, China. 120 participants answered subjective questionnaires and provided sets of physical data. For the collection of the measured parameters of indoor environment, predicted mean vote (PMV) and predicted percentage of dissatisfied (PPD), an indoor climate analyzer and a thermal comfort meter were used. The conclusions of that field study are presented.

The steady-state distribution of contaminant concentrations in a workroom depends on several factors, among them the types of air inlets and exhausts and their relative position. For that study different inlets and exhaust locations and types have been investigated in order to determine the optimal ones.Contaminant concentrations were explored by CFD and the results were validated with experimental results.