Main environmental studies are today, outdoor air quality, but not indoor air quality though there is mounting evidence that exposure to IAQ is the cause of excessive morbidity and mortality.Research within the areas of developing countries has had a low priority during the last half century compared with research on ambient air or industrial air.

In that study, two air supply devices were investigated in order to simulate the characteristic of natural wind. The paper demontrates that the simulated natural air movement had an acceptability, for the subjects exposed, higher than the artificial air movement. With simulated natural air movement comfort may improve with energy saving in warm climates.

This paper, on the basis of existing literature, sums up the factors that influence the human perception of air movement and it also tries to specify in general terms when air movement is desirable and when it is not.

In this paper the methodological benefits and constraints of conventional climate chamber research in comparison to the field-based alternative are discussed. The discussion of methodology is extended to the discipline of environmental psychology and with a questionning on how engineers have come to dominate a research topic that falls so clearly within the scope of psychology.

In this paper the assessment of moderately cold environments with two different methods : the PMV method and the IREQ method. The applicability of the comfort criteria is analyzed too for a more general assessment of cold environments.

Major ventilation developments covering systems, measurements and design methods have taken place over the last 25 years. Our understanding about the impact of ventilation on the indoor environment and energy use has also evolved. This paper outlines these developments. Many future challenges are considered including minimum ventilation rates, energy efficient cooling, cost effective heat recovery and the development of calculation techniques.

This study deals with the ventilation performance of two storey dwellings employing stack effect ventilation to satisfy the overall ventilation requirement. The SRF (Supply Rate Fulfillment) index was used as a ventilation performance index. The experiments were implemented to measure effective fresh air rate by using tracer gas in a test house. Following are the results of the experiments and the theoretical calculations. The measured air change rate and the SRF value were fairly close to the theoretical calculation.

For retrofitting of existing dwellings MVHR is seldom applied, despite the potential in energy saving and improving thermal comfort and indoor air quality. Major barriers and limitations for application are lack of space, especially for the supply ducts and the MVHR units as well as the complexity of execution. Also initial costs are an important barrier. Limiting supply ducts could be beneficial for application in single family dwellings. In a study some configurations with simplified air supply with MVHR in single family dwellings have been investigated.

Recent studies in Switzerland showed that in large non residential buildings, which can be compared for typology and ventilation needs, the consumption of electricity for mechanical ventilation can vary considerably from case to case. Moreover in such a building it represents a percentage not negligible of the whole consumption of electricity. We had a confirmation of that behaviour with a study we made during 1999-2000 on a set of eighty air treatment units of the Civic Hospital in Lugano (Southern Switzerland).

The main objective of the demonstration project LabSan is the innovative energetic retrofitting of a research laboratory building (3724 m² net floor area) which can serve as an outstanding and guiding example for a large number of existing laboratory buil