However, when the outdoor temperature excee ds indoor temperatures, it may
be wise to reduce the ventilation rate, only allowing high levels of ventilation at
night when the outdo or temper ature is low.
Ventilation is hence not only essential to ensure an acceptable indoor
air quality, but is also often used to improve thermal comfort. For this air
heating or cooling, air con ditioning (including air humidity control) or
free cooling (increasing the outdoor airflow rate to cool down the building
fabric) are used. In order to achieve these goals, several conditions should be
met:
.
Airflow rates should be adapted to need: if too low, good air quality will
not be achieved, or draughts, noise and energy waste may result from an
excessive airing.
.
The air should be well distributed: ideally, the fresh air should reach any
occupied zones first and contaminated air should be quickly extracted.
.
The air supply should not decrease comfort. It should not cause complaints
about draughts, noise or poor air quality.
.
The air supplied by ventilation systems should be clean and, where
appropriate, should comply with the temperature and moisture
requirements.
In addition, to comply with a sustainable development policy, the ventilation
systems should be energy efficient and should perform as required using a
minimum amount of energy.
Why assess airflows in buildings?
The conditions listed above are most likely to be met when the building and its
ventilation system are not only well designed and built, but also well commis-
sioned. Commissioning a ventilation system involves carrying out measure-
ments to check that it performs as expected. When these conditions are not
met or when there are problems, measurements may help in finding the
causes of the problem and in fixing them.
In order to show the usefulness of measurements, some results from
investigations performed on severa l air handling units are shown below. It
should be emphasized that these ventilation units were not selected because
they had problems. The air handling units, located in different buildings,
were measured in several measurement sessions (Roulet et al., 1999). In
some units, the airflow rate was far from the design values, or there was
unexpected recirculation.
Outdoor airflow rate
The comparison of design and measured outdoor airflow rate per person in 12
buildings is shown in Figure 0.1. It can be seen that in several buildings the
airflow rate per person is larger than 50 m
3
/h, and surpasses 200 m
3
/h.
xiv Ventilation and Airflow in Buildings
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