The European Community SAVE Directive 76/93, makes mandatory, among other things, for member states to implement an action called Energy Labelling of buildings. This labelling should consist of a description of the energy characteristics and some information about energy efficiency; and is aimed at reducing CO2 emission by means of a parallel reduction in energy consumption. The European Union allows each country to adopt the most suitable methodology according to weather and building industry characteristics and socio-economic context.

The Energy Conservation in Building and Community Systems program of the International Energy Agency has set up a research working group (Annex 40) on Commissioning of Building HVAC Systems for Improved Energy Performance. The objective of this new Annex is to develop, validate and document tools for commissioning buildings and building services. The paper describes the annex work which includes 5 tasks: 1) the commissioning process 2) manual commissioning tools 3) building energy management system assisted commissioning tools 4) use of models for ommissioning 5) commissioning projects.

TRNSYS’ thermal building model, type 56, requires air flows between zones as input values. However, in natural ventilation systems these depend on the wind pressures and the inside and outside temperatures. To account for this situation, a coupling with a

Studies on buildings’ airtightness have shown that several issues can arise from uncontrolled airflow leakages in buildings (e.g., higher energy cost, thermal comfort and health of occupants, building components and equipment preservation). Indeed, the ne

A simplified tool, called ConsoClim, has been developed for estimating energy consumption of air conditioned buildings and for comparing HVAC and building solutions. Its main aim is to be used at the early stage of the design process. It means that algorithms have been developed to be used with minimum and quite simple inputs that are available in manufacturers' catalogues or can be fixed at typical default values. The aim is to check that building design options and HVAC system choices lead together to an efficient global energy performance.

In the Mediterranean countries, where the active solutions of air-conditioning must be avoided, natural ventilation allows improvement of indoor comfort which is generally critical in hot season, and reduction of building cooling loads.A three-dimensional zonal model for calculating temperature fields and airflow distributions insideunconditioned buildings was developed.

Ventilation determines the indoor air quality and has a profound effect on the energy consumption and thermal (summer) comfort of buildings. Simulation of natural ventilation leads to the prediction and evaluation of these performances.Coupling ventilation network and thermal simulation models is necessary to simulate natural ventilation as the mass and energy balance are physically linked in a naturally ventilated building. Several ways of coupling exist, each having its own possibilities and difficulties.

The present work is part of a research effort aimed at integrating a detailed model of airflow in large spaces with an algebraic multizone infiltration model to describe pollutant transport and coupled air flows within and between complex buildings and large spaces. In the past 15 years, zonal models were developed with the goal to obtain an approximate prediction of airflow characteristics in large indoor spaces. Also, reducing the number of grids in CFD models is a natural way of decreasing their demand of computational resources to solve air flows in room.

Through the analysis of the main international environmental performance rating systems (BREEAM, LEED and GBTool) this work aims to show international design tendencies concerning sustainable building equipment requirements and to provide to designers and researchers a broad view of sustainable building equipment solutions. Hence a particular attention was paid to the assessment approach provided by these systems for each requirement, focussing on the comparison of the building performance to a benchmark, on compliance with qualitative indications or use of best technologies.

Through the analysis of the main international environmental performance rating systems (BREEAM, LEED and GBTool) this work aims to show international design tendencies concerning sustainable building equipment requirements and to provide to designers and researchers a broad view of sustainable building equipment solutions. Hence a particular attention was paid to the assessment approach provided by these systems for each requirement, focussing on comparison of the building performance to a benchmark, compliance with qualitative indications or use of best technologies.