Numerous studies and everyday experiencesprove the fact that even new buildings do notperform as expected. Dissatisfaction with theindoor air quality and thermal comfort iscommon and the energy performance is not onthe targeted level regardless of the newtechnologies utilized and advanced systemsinstalled. To avoid these Izinds of situationsquality assurance procedures known as BuildingCommissioning have been developed in manycountries and taken into the use especially inUSA.

Tokyo Electric Power Company R&D Center wascompleted in September 1994. The buildingsconstructed in Phase I (hereinafter just called "thebuildings") were conferred the 35th Annual Awardsby the Society of Heating, Air-Conditioning, andSanitary Engineers of Japan (SHASE). The awardwas given to commend the 30% (approx.) energysavings attained by the adoption of the cold airdistribution system and various other techniques andtechnologies for energy conservation and operationmanagement.

Activated carbon filters have been used forpurification of air and water in industrialapplications. However these technologies have notbeen applied to the non-industrial builtenvironment in general and there is no standard toquantify or to classify the performance of thesesystems for in-duct mechanical systemapplication.

The research regarding the importance of indoorair quality is recently becoming issue fromKorea and various methods are being used toimprove interior air quality. Indoor aircontamination became an important issue as theamount of infiltration is diminished by tightlysealed envelopes, and the building materialsmade of chemical components are frequentlyused.

The results of a recent research and it'sstatistical analysis, show that in some of theIranian cities like YAZD, there are two periods(from end of august to end of September andfrom end of February to end of March) in whichoutdoor pollution is higher than other periods.School starting and industrial activities in thesummer could be the prime reasons of thisphenomenon.

Reinforcement of air-tightness and thermalinsulation in the indoors leads to the declinein air-change rate. Moreover, due toincreased chemical substances on furniture,the indoor air-quality becomes worse andmay induce various health problenls, namelythe condition known as the Sick BuildingSyndrome(SB S).Many tools and methods are being developedto improve indoor air-quality.

During the past half century, filtration techniques based on the use of activated carbons have been widely used in industrial applications, and considerable knowledge about the mass transfer processes involved has been developed. Surprisingly, the use of activated carbon filters in building applications has remained marginal, and one reason is probably the lack of information on the actual efficiency of such systems in realistic configurations of building operation.

A double-skin facade is installed in a laboratory full scale test cell. The double-skin fagade has a 20 cm wide air cavity with Venetian sun-shading blinds and is provided with mechanical ventilation. The experiments are performed in fully controlled conditions. The results are including temperature measurements in several locations in the faqade and test cell. Two main scenarios (summer and winter situation) are investigated. Under these scenarios different ventilation configurations with various operation strategies are implemented.

It is known that there are some methods ofenergy conservation for building facilities.Energy recovery ventilator (ERV),which canrecover sensible heat and latent heat, is one ofthe solution to reduce heatinglcooling loads,which are related to the power consumption ofair conditioning systems. Manufacturesspecify the performance of ERV'seffectiveness on the specification, however,there are few measured examples on energyeffectiveness in actual conditions in mildclimate area.

Today lots of research and application of solarheating are focused on continuously occupiedbuildings, such as residential buildings. Thispaper studies solar heating for intermittentlyoccupied buildings such as offices, classrooms,workshops which generally are unoccupiedduring nights and weekends. If we stop spaceheating during nights, energy for space heatingwill be reduced. In the paper, a simple buildingis assumed and a solar assisted space heatingsystem is designed for it.