Data center facilities that house computer equipment represent a high capital investment and are typically designed to function for at least a few years, often without any down time. The computer equipment is usually designed with the assumption of rack air inlet temperatures in the 20-30C range. Although there are many different perspectives for optimizing such a computing facility, ensuring device reliability by delivering uninterruptible power and cool air to the inlet of the electronics remains the most important goal.

In low-energy building design, energy consumption due to space conditioning is responsible for over 30% of total energy consumed in commercial buildings. In an effort to evaluate low-energy building designs, two commercial office buildings were each monitored for 16 months. A comparison of the two buildings, with different ventilation strategies but located in the same climate, is presented. One is naturally ventilated without mechanical chillers, and the other uses a raised floor system combined with a chilled ceiling for space conditioning.

For this study; air circulation and temperature distribution in a room for a particular location of air inlet and outlet on opposite walls, has been investigated. A two-dimensional, steady, laminar, incompressible flow has been considered.

For this research, results from field surveys are used to formulate a method for simulation of office buildings to include the effects of window opening behaviour on comfort and energy use. What is general window opening behaviour ? How can an "adaptive algorithm" be framed to predict whether windows are open ? How can the algorithm be used within a simulation to allow the effects of window opening on comfort and energy use to be quantified ? These are the points the paper focuses on. The findings are presented.

This paper describes the Frederick Lanchester Library at Coventry University, UK, that incorporates natural ventilation, daylighting and passive cooling strategies and presents the energy consumption and the internal temperatures and CO2 levels recorded in 2004/2005. The performances are good, the building uses under half the energy of a standard air-conditioned building and can keep the interior comfortable and up to 5C below ambient.

Monitoring campaigns have been carried out over 2 or 3 years in 12 low-energy office buildings located in three different summer climate zones (summer cool, moderate, and summer hot) in Germany. The raw data were processed for data evaluation of the time of occupancy. A comfort evaluation in these 12 low-energy office buildings indicates clearly that buildings using only natural heat sinks for cooling provide a good thermal comfort during typical and warm summer periods in Germany.

The European Standardisation Organisation (CEN) has drafted several standards to help the member countries to implement the European Directive for Energy Performance of Buildings (EPBD) approved in 2003.One of these draft standard is the "Indoor environmental criteria for design and assessment of energy performance of buildings-addressing IAQ, thermal environment, lighting and acoustics" This paper describes the philosophy of some of the principles used in the standard, and gives some examples presented in it.

The potential use of natural ventilation as a passive cooling system in new building designs in Kayseri, a midsize city in Turkey, was investigated for that study. Indoor air velocity distributions were simulated by the Fluent package program. Using the simulated data, an artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed for the prediction of indoor average and maximum air velocities. A high correlation was found between the simulated and the ANN predicted data.

This paper is a demonstration of how school facilities can be designed and operated to tally with Ashrae's ventilation, energy and thermal comfort standards while remaiming energy efficient and cost effective.

The university of Michigan and its stakeholders invested in the creation of the Life Science Institute (LSI) , state-of-the-art research facility, to foster basic and translational research. That paper gives a description of that six-floors building, its design considerations, the central plant heating and cooling, the vivarium space design based on a ventilated cage rack system. The environmental impact is presented too.