Walker I S, Wilson D J
Year:
1994
Bibliographic info:
15th AIVC Conference "The Role of Ventilation", Buxton, UK, 27-30 September 1994

This paper discusses four concepts that have been found useful in improving estimates of ventilation rates in residential buildings. These concepts are improved methods for describing leakage distribution and wind pressures: 1. Separation of large, well defined "local" leakage sites from the background building leakage. 2. Changing surface pressure coefficients to account for the effect of upwind obstacles. 3. Making wind pressures (in terms of pressure coefficient and wind shelter) continuous functions of wind direction. 4. Development of a wind shadow shelter model specifically tailored for buildings in urban locations. The effectiveness of the implementation of these four concepts was examined by comparing predicted ventilation rates using a computer model (LOCALEAKS) that incorporates these concepts to several thousand hours of ventilation measurements from the Alberta Home Heating Research Facility (AHHRF). The houses at AHHRF have been tested in several leakage configurations to evaluate the model performance over a wide range of parameters. For brevity, a single leakage configuration is discussed in this paper that shows the success and failures of the model in predicting ventilation rates for complex leakage and shelter configurations. The above methods for improving ventilation calculations can be applied to other models and are not restricted to use in the ventilation model used for this study.