Smoking restrictions in the workplace and increased health consciousness at home have seen a sizable reduction in the number of spaces where smoking is permissible. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of ventilation in public houses, one of the few remaining public spaces where smoking is still socially acceptable. Little is known about the situation with shared occupancies, where relatively large areas are intended to accommodate both smokers and non-smokers.

As everybody knows, today the air quality of an indoor environment may have several effects on our health; the beginning of serious breathing pathologies and of some forms of cancer, are with no doubt due to the presence of polluting and extremely noxious agents in the places we most frequently use. That's the reason why it is very important that indoor rooms are correctly aired also in our homes where, due to several incidental factors, the healthiness of the environment is still guaranteed by the mere and discretionary operation of users of opening the windows.

A simplified natural ventilation model for dwellings is developed and used to determine the impact of different ventilation strategies on the building loads and zones temperatures. It deals with the sensitivity of loads and temperatures to classical default parameters as : wind velocity, wind coefficient value, building environment and shielding conditions, and the actual cross section of the openings. All the simulations are performed using the TRNSYS 14.2 simulation software, TYPE56.

The purpose of this work is to evaluate the thermal comfort of human beings in outdoor spaces, taking into account the microclimatic modifications produced by vegetation. The parameters needed to formulate a comfort index are of differing orders of magnitude, so the same conditions could be seen as comfortable outdoors and yet be unacceptable indoors. One of the most influential landscape elements in the degree of comfort is vegetation. The main effects of vegetation are on solar radiation and wind.

The present energy consumption of European Buildings is higher than necessary, given the developments in control engineering. Optimization and integration of smart control into building systems can save substantial quantities of energy on a European scale while improving the standards for indoor comfort.

The work presented in this paper was done in 1997 as a final thesis in mechanical engineering, supervised by TRANSSOLAR Energietechnik GmbH in cooperation with the Institute for Thermodynamics and Heat Technology (ITW), University of Stuttgart. The contents of the work is the investigation of natural ventilation through window openings (single sided and cross ventilation) in an existing office space. Both measurements and computer simulation have been conducted.

Over the last decades, a great importance has been given to thermal insulation, in technological designing of building envelope. Lately, a basic requirement of indoor air quality, strictly related to ventilation control strategies, has been highlighted. Then, it is necessary to evaluate correctly, during the design phase, the air permeability of enclosures through validated methods, to assess new technologies through laboratory tests on prototypes and finally to verify real performances through on-site testings.

The present paper investigates the potential of night ventilation techniques when applied to full scale office buildings, under different structure, design, ventilation, and climatic characteristics. The approach of this study includes the use of both experimental data and theoretical tools in order to determine the impact and the limitations of night ventilation regarding the thermal behavior of various types of office buildings.

The present paper deals with one of the most important mechanisms of inter-zone mass and energy transfer, namely the buoyancy-driven flows through stairwells that connect the floors of buildings. To further investigate these phenomena, experimental as well as theoretical studies have been carried out. A series of experiments have been performed in order to study the airflow through a typical stairwell that connects the two individual zones of a two-storey house. Airflow rates between the two zones were measured using a single tracer gas decay technique.