With the increasing concerns on the issues of global warming, urban heat island and depletion of fossilfuels, energy saving effort is getting more and more important, particularly in the city context. Althoughthere are a number of sectoral energy related studies, comprehensive overview of the overall energyuse in cities is still not well understood.

Recently most houses in northern Japan are highly insulated and air-tight, which can lead to seriousproblems such as indoor air pollution. It is important to evaluate the performance of an air-tight housefrom the viewpoint of ventilation. However, in general, houses consist of multiple rooms and each roomhas airflows in different directions which mix with each other. Therefore it is not easy to measure realventilation rates.The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a simplified method for measuring airflow rates in houseswhich have a basement with outer insulation.

The indoor air quality of railroad passenger cabin is often polluted by various pollutants. The pollutantssources of the passenger cabin are the passengers with their belongings, the inflowing outdoor air, andthe interior materials like floorings, seats, paints, and adhesives. In this study, we focused on thepollutants emissions from the interior materials, and carried out the characterization of emitted volatileorganic compound (VOC) in an environmental chamber. We could find out that a large amount ofvarious VOCs emitted from the surface of interior materials.

Conventional techniques for the measurement of adventitious leakage of building envelopes are basedon steady pressurisation at high pressures (e.g. 50 Pa) that are not normally encountered with naturalor mechanical ventilation. It is the leakage at low pressures (e.g. 4 Pa) that is of interest and it is shownthat the conventional technique leads to large uncertainty in the low-pressure leakage. Ideally apressurisation of 4 Pa should be used, but with the conventional technique the uncertainty due to windeffects is unacceptably large.

Photovoltaic-thermal (PV/T) systems integrate photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies into onesingle system with dual production of electricity and heat energy. There are alternative designs to suitdifferent applications. For a given collector surface area, the overall system energy performance ishigher than the conventional "side-by-side" PV and solar thermal systems. This helps to promote PVsince the economic payback period of PV/T is much shorter. In this paper, the various water-basedPV/T systems and products are reviewed.

Longitudinal ventilation systems are commonly installed in new tunnels in big cities of the Far Eastincluding Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many tunnels are found and some of them areinclined at an angle to the horizontal. However, smoke movement in those tilted tunnels is not fullyunderstood. Some longitudinal ventilation was designed based on presumed smoke movementpattern without experimental demonstration.Smoke movement pattern in a tilted tunnel model was studied by scale modeling technique.

This work examines the applicability of comfort criteria, based on a heat balance model and on anadaptive model, in naturally ventilated classrooms. The adaptive opportunity of students are limitedduring the lesson time, while they are free during the lesson breaks. The field study was conducted byphysical observations, survey questionnaires and behavioral observations. Both field measurementsand subjective surveys were performed at the same time during the regular lesson period.

The indoor air quality management of the public places is gaining wide attention in Korea, because theindoor air quality of the public places are obliged to satisfy the guidelines suggested by Korean Ministryof Environment. According to this regulation, the railroad stations are regarded as public places whilethe passenger cabin of train is excluded. However, because the passengers spend more time in thepassenger cabin than in the stations, the indoor air quality management of the passenger cabin is moreimportant.

This work deals with the evaluation of the performances of phase change materials (PCMs) coupledwith a ventilated ceiling system in order to reduce summer cooling loads and improve the internalcomfort in buildings, thus enhancing the positive effect of night ventilation.Object of the study is the numerical simulation of the thermal behaviour of a typical open space officelocated in three Italian cities during the summer. Indoor climate is only controlled by means of passiveventilation; a usual ventilation system configuration (i.e.

The paper reports the first results of research carried out at the Department of Design and BuildingConstruction of the University of Palermo analysing the problems related to the design of sustainablebuilding envelopes in the Mediterranean Basin. The paper shows the design strategies adopted by agroup of students in their graduation thesis on the recovery of Mazara del Vallo city hall in order toinvestigate the issue of existing buildings and sustainability.