Airbase publication

Air infiltration control is essential to guarantee thermal comfort, good performance of the ventilation systems, and more energy-efficient buildings. The evaluation of the global airtightness of the building envelope based on pressurization tests has been widely used combined with infrared thermography as a complementary tool to locate air leakage paths. This work proposes a new methodology whose main objective is the characterization of the air infiltration path using infrared thermography.

Green buildings incorporate several features to improve energy efficiency, indoor environmental conditions, and occupant satisfaction. However, studies have indicated that green-certified buildings do not always provide occupants with an acceptable level of satisfaction. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) requires that at least 80% of occupants are satisfied with the indoor thermal conditions.

Hospitals’ indoor environmental quality (IEQ) impacts on patients’ comfort and well-being. Relationships between IEQ indicators and people’s assessment are often investigated by examining the main IEQ parameters – thermal, visual, and acoustical comfort and indoor air quality – separately. People’s assessment is multi-sensory and balances the positive sensations against the negative. To estimate it, IEQ models aggregate data from sensor measurements and/or surveys, expressing parameters’ relative importance through regression coefficients.

The discomfort prediction inside buildings by means of correlations able to estimate people subjective response from indoor conditions has been widely investigated with the purpose of supporting design, commissioning and operation of buildings. Technical standards have been developed based on these findings, suggesting or prescribing acceptability ranges for the different environmental quantities involved mainly in single comfort aspects.

When implementing or studying building controls and interfaces in the field, researchers often witness first-hand human-building interactions from operators and occupants. While current comfort and occupant behavior models are able to explain some of these interactions, many fall under the fields of psychology, sociology and other humanities, which can be difficult for building technology researchers to interpret.

Under the influence of biological hazards including COVID-19, it is required sufficient ventilation to decrease the infection risk in the indoor area. In particular, the natural ventilation with window opening is recommended in rooms with inadequate ventilation. However, the ventilation rate, energy loss, and indoor thermal environment with window opening in air-conditioned room varies hourly with given environment. In addition, opening windows in winter causes serious problems such as deterioration of the indoor thermal environment and reduction of absolute humidity.

The ALLO project aims to be innovative in the way it approaches information and its dissemination to residents who are concerned about air quality in their home or are not familiar with the subject. In this paper, we are focusing on one important pollutant, i.e. PM2.5, on more particularly on low-cost sensors that provides PM2.5 data in rooms at short timesteps (usually 5 min.).

When designed and operated adequately, natural ventilation (NV) can improve the buildings’ energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality. There is a plethora of factors that limit the effectiveness of NV, such as the climate, surrounding buildings, noise, and ambient air pollution, especially in urban environments. Nevertheless, the existing NV potential (NVP) calculation methods are complex and difficult to be used. This study proposes a new methodology for quantifying the NVP by considering the exterior climate and ambient air pollution.

Deep Energy renovation (DER) adopts a whole building approach and achieves much larger energy savings than shallow energy renovations that typically only included a small number (one or two) of upgrade measures. DER includes the installation of high levels of insulation, uses renewable energy technologies and minimises uncontrolled air leakage by achieving air permeability levels no greater than 5 m3/h.m2 to achieve building energy ratings (BER) of at least A3.

Current building regulations are designed to ensure that buildings, including newly built and retrofitted residential dwellings, are more energy efficient. This has raised concerns and practical challenges in relation to maintaining acceptable indoor environmental and air quality. However, there are minimal data available regarding long-term indoor air pollutant concentrations in low-energy residential buildings.