All buildings, depending on their design and particularly on how they are vented, are polluted to some extent with radon. Radon and its daughters may be trapped within buildings and accumulate there, thus threatening the health of their dwellers. Radon is an inert radioactive gas whose emanation into the building can mostly come from the underlying soil and from the building materials. The unhealthy buildings risk starts to act with tendency of saving energy and the related limitation of room ventilation to minimum.

The focus of this paper is on controlling ventilation rate to provide acceptable temperature and relative humidity in the space being ventilated. To this end, a system of heat and moisture balance equations for building indoor and components is described. The system is solved numerically. Based on a series of indoor temperature and moisture measurements for our experimental house and well-mixed air distribution in room, moisture generation rate is estimated. The model is validated by simulating the experimental house. Good agreement between the simulated and measured results is obtained.

The Second Skin Facades can be an useful tool for increasing the efficient use of natural ventilation in order to decrease the energy consumption for ventilation and cooling purposes and to increase the indoor thermal comfort levels. To analyze this type of facades a simulation is set up. The simulation is carried out with the simulation code Simulink.

This research investigates the effect of integrating solar radiation, internal building mass, thermal insulation and natural ventilation on building thermal performance. A field study and a computer simulation were conducted on the Beliveau house located in Blacksburg- Virginia. The house designer implemented several new ideas for integrating solar radiation, thermal mass, thermal insulation, and air ventilation to conserve energy. The goal of this study is to investigate the relationships between these design variables.

Ventilation system has to be design in order to strike a balance between indoor air quality and energy requirements.So, the ventilation efficiency can be considered as a major issue to deal with this objective. In order to assess the efficiency of pollutant elimination from a room, a methodological approach using CPD has been developed. It is based both on local and global indexes. These indexes take into account the distribution of pollutant concentration inside room and the mean concentration at the exhaust with respect to the occupant location.

54 fume hoods in three laboratory buildings in Norway were tested for containment using two tracer methods based on European and American standards, in addition to face velocity measurements. In the first method, an abridged version of Nordtest VVS 095, tracer gas was measured at one point in the sash opening, in front of a mannequin placed at the fume hood with a sash height of 30 cm. In the second method, based on ASHRAE 110-1995, tracer was measured in the breathing zone of the mannequin for a 67 cm sash height.

The evaluation of the ventilation effectiveness and thermal comfort for various industrial ventilation schemes has been carried out by 1:4 scale model experimentation. Measurements of air speed, temperature, and contaminant concentration allowed the contaminant removal and thermal comfort to be quantified using ventilation effectiveness and thermal comfort indices, respectively. Archimedes number scaling was used to convert the small scale measurements to full scale conditions. The ventilation efficiency generally increased when the heat load was increased and/or the flow rate decreased.

The effect on ventilation effectiveness parameters of the recirculation of air is investigated. The results of work with respect to air change effectiveness parameters is explained and extended to the effect of recirculation on the contaminant removal effectiveness parameter of local air quality index. It is demonstrated, first with respect to a simple system with one supply and exhaust and then by extension to a system with multiple exhausts, that it is possible to calculate the effect of recirculation by means of a simple algebraic expression.

As heat exchanges through building envelopes and undesirable internal gains have been reduced in the last years due to energy conservation efforts, the importance of the energy needed to heat, cool and move outdoor air for ventilation has increased in relative tem1s. This study, developed within the European project TIP-VENT (JOULE) aims to study the impact of ventilation air flow rates upon the energy needs of typical buildings. Five real buildings were selected as case-studies: A hotel, an auditorium, an office building, a single-family residence and an apartment building.