At the Passivhaus of Cherasco, located in Pianura Padana (Italy), an earth to air heat exchanger (EAHE) and natural night ventilation (in summer) are used to deliver comfort conditions with very low energy consumption. One  year and a half of continuous measurements have been carried out in order to evaluate the energy and comfort performances of this building, which combines the Passivhaus concept with local architectural solutions. We present an analysis of the system constituted by building envelope and EAHE.

The paper documents an ongoing study in the use of Building Performance Simulation (BPS) as a source of feedback in the early stages of architectural design. Taking advantage of the specific affordances provided by parametric scripting for design, fine-grained data about design evolution is gathered from a group of ar-chitecture students. Through the use of computational tools for data analysis, the aim is to gain understand-ing into patterns of scripting in conjunction with BPS.

This study reviews typical assumptions for days of operation, sub-space type receptacle and other unregulated process loads, and occupancy rates to propose a risk evaluation for energy simulation accuracy of office buildings. Office building simulations entail low-, medium-, or high- risk of being inaccurate based on the variation of key energy simulation parameters from typical values used in office buildings. The three parameters and associated risk should indicate a potential difference between projected design and actual energy use for high performance office buildings.

In this article, an under-floor air distribution system is analyzed.  The inlet device is placed near a thermal manikin and several turbulence intensities are imposed. Sensitive parts of the body are exposed to the airflow. While global comfort index show no difference in comparison to classical air diffusion strategy, local evaluation of the convective heat flux reveals several particularities. The CFD study gives us not only temperature and velocity fields, but also flow path-lines around a virtual thermal manikin, allowing us to evaluate indoor environmental quality.  

The majority of the natural lighting, in urban slums and rural areas arround the world, is blocked off and virtually no light reaches the building spaces in lower floors as well as the streets and urban spaces. Painting the buildings' surfaces may increase the availability of daylight below. Some surfaces may be easier to paint and will require less cost or effort to paint than others. This paper formulates a combinatorial optimization problem to address this situation and uses different approaches to solve the problem.

This paper describes the use of building performance simulation into a wider implementation of an energy management system (EnMS) based on ISO 50001 requirements. The CASCADE project, funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) call ”ICT for Energy Efficient Buildings” aims to test different modelling strategies supporting Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD). Some of the main challenges includes the integration of new and legacy IT systems, the adoption of a robust calibration methodology, and the systematic verification of energy savings.