Air quality monitoring as well as comfort or overall energy performance require accurate information on airflow patterns, while they are particularly difficult to assess in existing buildings. We present an innova-tive instrumentation system using gas tracers, based on the combined use of several highly sensitive emerging micro-gas chromatographs (µGC) as pollutant sensors and an identification method for data processing.

During the last years, the modeling language Modelica became increasingly used in building performance simulation. Several Modelica libraries for building components and HVAC equipment exist and many research groups use the language. This paper provides an overview about the application of Modelica. This includes modeling on different scales (e.g., urban scale, building envelope, HVAC system) and for different applications (e.g., conceptual building design, building operation).

With the present drive to add renewable generation capacity to existing electrical networks, utility providers are seeking ways to store electrical energy as a means of prioritising renewable sources against an unfavourable load profile. One way to do this is through electrical storage heaters and hot water systems within the domestic sector.

This paper discusses the use of a high-resolution code based on the discontinuous Galerkin method (DGM) for the direct numerical simulation (DNS) of natural convection flows in buildings. The high order of ac-curacy, combined to geometric flexibility and paral-lel scalability of DGM, provide - on paper - an ideal method for this type of simulation.

The computational cost for the repeated evaluation of zonal-type building simulation models can be pro-hibitive especially in contexts, such as Building Opti-mization and Control Design, where repeated evalua-tion of the models — for different initial and bound-ary conditions — is required.