Increased global warming and deterioration of the ozone layer have stimulated interest in the use of renewable energy systems. Natural ventilation is increasingly being employed in modern buildings to minimize energy consumption and the release of harmful emissions to the environment. Innovative natural ventilation techniques such as the windcatcher and solar chimney have facilitated the effective use of natural ventilation in a wide range of buildings for increasing the ventilation rate.

The "Intelligent Facade" is seen as a central element in the evolution of building form and building fabric to provice environmental control and comfort. Describes the background of bioclimatic architecture and goes on to give an outline of the subject of intelligent skins for buildings. Provides two examples of the case study review which has been performed.

In this paper, measurement and simulation results are presented that demonstrate the energy performance of a recently built ecological house in Helsinki, Finland. The space heating energy consumption was measured to be 76 kWh/(m 2 a) of which 29% was provided by wood. For comparison, Finnish houses typically consume 120 kWh/(m 2 a) or nearly 60% more energy for space heating. The total energy consumption (121 kWh/(m 2 a)) and electricity consumption (28 kWh/(m 2 a)) were quite low.

The aim is to develop a new method for comfort in settings with high thermal load in buildings that do not require continuous cooling but cooling only during shorter periods. Example of such buildings is schools. The present ventilation and control systems are designed for supply of air at a constant flowrate or to respond to relatively slow variations in load or step changes in load. The slow variations in load are mainly governed by the diurnal cycle and sudden step changes in load are mainly due to people entering or leaving a room.

The paper reviewed the supply opening models of describing inlet boundary conditions for indoor airflow simulation firstly. Then examples of isothermal free air jets from a grille are presented to validate full representation of supply openings. Some results by the simplified method called N-point supply opening model, are also shown to compare with the full representation method. Four different outlet conditions of a grille are studied. The k-e turbulence model is applied.

When studying improvements on room by room air conditioning appliances (RAC), it is necessary to know for how long these appliances function and which is their effectiveness - EER - on average (or Seasonal) known as SEER. A method was developed for Europe, taking into account the cycling losses, the fouling losses and the variations due to outside temperature and humidity. Further to this the load was represented by an equivalent number of hours at full load.

Thermal bridges are the typical locations for moisture and mould problems in buildings. Low surface temperatures in combination with a high humidity level in buildings can lead to severe problems and complaints by the occupants. Thermal bridges lead also to a significant increase of the energy losses in well insulated buildings. At present, thermal bridge problems still frequently occur in new buildings but especially in rehabilitation projects. In several countries so-called thermal bridge atlases already exist.

In this paper the experimental results of the measurements obtained after the completion of a test room realised in the laboratories of the Dipartimento di Energetica dell'Universit di Ancona and the development of the monitoring system are reported. The same authors have already discuss in others works the preliminary studies about these themes and in which it is possible to read the first data of the effectuated studies about climatization phenomena.

Building-integrated photovoltaic (PV) systems are increasingly common in developed countries and have the potential to contribute significantly to electricity generation as a benign alternative to fossil fuel generation. The University of Nottingham has recently completed a new campus, The Jubilee Campus. PVs are integrated into the roofs of four atria for the teaching buildings in the new campus. This paper presents the performance of roof-integrated PVs using CFD (computational fluid dynamics).

Earth-air heat exchangers can be used to reduce energy consumption in building ventilation systems. The idea is to pre-heat air in winter and pre-cool air in summer using the thermal capacity of the soil. To do this concrete and plastic tubes are put underground, through which the ventilation air is drawn. In this paper a 3D unstructured finite volume model is derived, which allows evaluating the earth-air heat exchanger. The model solves conduction through the soil and the convection from air to the tube wall.