Airbase publication

According to the 2016 Household Projections report, England’s housing stock could reach 28 million households by 2039 with approximately one fifth being new constructions. A significant proportion of these newly built dwellings may face a high risk of overheating as a result of the combined effects of climate change and more stringent building thermal efficiency standards, if not appropriately designed.

The effectiveness of night ventilation strategy for residential buildings in the old town of Ghadames has been investigated in this study. Methods of field surveys including observations, temperature measurements and interviews were conducted to determine the characteristic building parameters and strategies including window patterns and space organisation that mostly contributed to achieve an efficient indoor comfort conditions especially at night summer time. Results showed that skylight openings can be a good window pattern for enhancing night ventilation in hot arid climate.

In Korea, a large amount of fine dust and carbonyl compounds is generated during cooking in the kitchen. The purpose of this study is to select 20 apartment houses and measure contaminants that are generated during cooking in apartment houses in Korea. The measurement result showed that 15 out of 20 apartment houses exceeded the guidelines for PM10 based on its peak concentration. The concentration of carbonyl compounds was measured in the descending order of acrolein (270.0㎍/m3), formaldehyde (239.5㎍/m3) based on its average concentration.

The Royal Wanganui Opera House (RWOH), in Whanganui, New Zealand, was constructed in 1899, and now seats 830 people. This building was designed with a natural ventilation system; however, this system is no longer in operation and the RWOH has received regular complaints from patrons regarding indoor thermal comfort. Various options for mechanical systems to improve indoor comfort during summer performances have been considered, but have been deemed too costly. The RWOH is listed with Heritage New Zealand as a Category 1 heritage building.

Mechanical ventilation has become a mandatory requirement in multiple European standards addressing indoor air quality (IAQ) and ventilation in residential dwellings (single family houses and low-rise apartment buildings). This article presents the state of the art study through a review of the existing literature, to establish a link between ventilation rate and key indoor air pollutants. Design characteristics of a mechanical ventilation system such as supply/exhaust air flow, system and design of supply and exhaust outlets were considered.

The Spanish Technical Building Code establishes the criteria for indoor air quality fixing minimum and constant ventilation rates per local. Currently, there is a proposal to modify the regulations so that the IAQ criteria becomes more useful by setting it based on average concentrations of CO2 and accumulated CO2 in the habitable rooms. However, the indoor average concentration is not the average concentration at which the occupants are exposed.

The airtightness of buildings is important for several reasons, such as being a prerequisite for low-energy buildings and for a healthy indoor air quality (without i.e. mould or radon). The airtightness of buildings can vary over time and investigations are made on these variations due to moisture induced movements in wooden constructions, and subsequent consequences, using both measurements and numerical simulations.

In the Framework of the IEA EBC Annex68 Subtask 1 working subject, we aimed at defining an indoor air quality index for residential buildings based on long- and short-term exposure limit values. This paper compares 8 indoor air quality indices (IEI, LHVP, CLIM2000, BILGA, GAPI, IEI Taiwan, QUAD-BBC and DALY) by using the French IAQ Observatory database that includes pollutant concentration measurements performed in 567 dwellings between 2003 and 2005. This comparison allows to make a relevant analysis of each index and determines their pros and cons i.e.

With the combination of two fans and a heat exchanger in one single component there is the possibility to design a compact and highly efficient ventilation system especially for use in building modernization. One crossflow fan generates both airflows (outdoor/supply and extract/exhaust air) and simultaneously acts as counterflow heat exchanger. The space between the fan blades is filled with elements which operate as regenerative heat exchanger. The modified laboratory prototype of the so called Counterflow Heat Recovery Fan was optimized for the use as single/double room unit.

When considering the performance of HRV systems, the discussion is generally focusing on the reported effectiveness of the air-to-air heat exchanger. Although some excellent presentations at the AIVC conference in the past have dealt with uncertainties related to the test of that effectiveness, the fact that the heat recovered by the HRV unit might not be useful in an intermittently heated dwelling without room-by-room based demand control is usually not considered. Therefore, the ‘use-factor’ for the recovered heat is quantified in this paper.