English

Efforts to develop an international standard in the area of Building Environmental Design started in 1994 under the auspices of ISO TC 205. As part of the overall standard, Working Group 4 (IAQ) has developed a standard which covers methods of expressing IAQ and incorporating the goal of achieving good IAQ in the design process.

As part of the European research project HOPE (Health Optimisation Protocol of Energy efficient buildings), a comparison is made of the indoor environment in office buildings perceived as either healthy or less healthy. The aim is to characterise the differences between energy efficient buildings perceived healthy and energy efficient buildings perceived unhealthy. In 5 European countries, a pair-wise comparison of a healthy building and an unhealthy office has been made. The selection of the buildings was based on the results of an occupant questionnaire survey.

Within the European research project HOPE, 64 office buildings were audited regarding in-door environment quality and building characteristics. Of those buildings, two groups are se-lected: 21 buildings with low prevalence of the sick building syndrome, and 21 buildings with the largest prevalence. However, none of these buildings was considered a priori as sick. Both groups are similar for age of occupants, type of work, ownership, external environment, outdoor temperature, orientation, and smoking policy.

Experience shows that there are differences between the design and the real load of ventilation systems. Consequently, the fresh air demand usually varies over a wide range during operation. In normal usage, different types of gaseous contaminants enter the air, that might be hazardous to health. The constant inhalation of contaminated indoor air might lead discomfort or to harmful physiological effects.

For many commercial and industrial plants, maintaining required ventilation rates can result in significant operating costs. Fortunately, passive (i.e. enthalpy exchangers) and active (dehumidifying) desiccant systems can be used to reduce the load on the HVAC equipment and reduce its operating costs.

Results from 100 apartment buildings built in 1990’s in Finland were compared. Apartment buildings were divided into three main groups; Mechanical exhaust only, mechanical supply and exhaust air systems with heat recovery centralized solutions and de-cent

With the analysis of the U.S. EPA BASE data from 100 U.S. office buildings, the authors made associations between moisture and ventilation system contamination with lower respiratory and mucous membrane symptoms . For that they used multivariate regression models .

Data centers need good air conditioning systems that maintain the temperature around the equipment. The use of VAV variable volume air conditioning in that data centers is The paper focuses on the saving of energy consumption with VAV systems installed in data centers.

The ozone (O3) has become an interesting atmospheric pollutant due to the complexity of thetransfer phenomenon to the indoor environment. The study of this phenomenon representedthe main objective of the French national research program PRIMEQUAL PREDIT. Theexperimental work, carried out in eight schools in La Rochelle France, proved that the O3 transfer could be predicted as a function of the outdoor concentration level and the airtightness of the building faade.

The protection of non-smokers against tobacco smoke is a very popular subject. In Japan,the health promotion law was passed in 2002. However, in restaurants and pubs, thepreventive actions against environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) are inadequate and ineffective. This paper presents ETS measurements taken in a restaurant and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation to reproduce the measurement condition.Several ventilation systems to improve the air quality in non-smoking zones are studied byCFD case studies.