Categories of indoor environmental quality and building energy demand for heating and cooling

Abstract

Maintaining suitable indoor climate conditions is a need for the occupants' well being, while requiring very strictly thermal comfort conditions and very high levels of indoor air quality in buildings represents also a high expense of energy, with its consequence in terms of environmental impact and cost. In fact, it is well known that the indoor environmental quality (IEQ), considering both thermal and indoor air quality aspects, has a primary impact not only on the perceived human comfort, but also on the building energy consumption. This issue is clearly expressed by the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive 2002/92/EC, together with the most recent 2010/31/EU, which underlines that the expression of a judgment about the energy consumption of a building should be always joint with the corresponding indoor environmental quality level required by occupants. To this aim, the concept of indoor environment categories has been introduced in the EN 15251 standard. These categories range from I to III, where category I refers to the highest level of indoor climate requirement. In the challenge of reducing the environmental impact for air conditioning in buildings, it is essential that IEQ requirements are relaxed in order to widen the variations of the temperature ranges and ventilation air flow rates. In this paper, by means of building energy simulation, the heating and cooling energy demand are calculated for a mechanically controlled office building where different indoor environmental quality levels are required, ranging from category I to category III of EN 15251. The building is located in different European cities (Moscow, Torino and Athens), characterized by significantly different wheatear conditions. The mutual relation between heating and cooling energy demand and the required levels of IEQ is highlighted. The simulations are performed on a typical office room which is adopted as a reference in validation tests of the European Standard EN 15265 to validate calculation procedures of energy use for space heating and cooling. Keywordsindoor environmental quality, categories, energy demand, building energy simulation Article History

Simulation-based framework to evaluate resistivity of cooling strategies in buildings against overheating impact of climate change

“…A Distinct comfort categories for the office room and the administration room are considered. The comfort Category II is set for the office room due to the normal level of expectation that should be used for the new buildings [76]. It corresponds to a fixed maximum indoor operative temperature limit of 26 • C. The minimum ventilation rate requirement for Category II is 1.4 l/s.m 2 .…”

The Interaction Effect of Occupant Behavior-Related Factors in Office Buildings Based on the DNAS Theory

“…To study occupant behaviors, most of the related research defined them on the basis of occupant movements [39][40][41][42][43] and the control actions of occupants on windows, lights, air conditioning terminals and other equipment [26,[44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. Wang et al [40] indicated that building occupant behaviors can be broken down into two aspects: occupancy, which refers to the in-building rate; and occupants' control behaviors on building devices, including windows, doors, blinds, air conditioning terminals, lights and equipment (TVs, computers, printers, etc.).…”

Building Energy Performance Analysis: An Experimental Validation of an In-House Dynamic Simulation Tool through a Real Test Room

“…• a reliable dynamic simulation tool for the building energy performance analysis capable of reliably predicting the related energy demands and the indoor environmental conditions [67][68][69]; • a flexible tool to be used for the implementation of new add-on models able to suitably assess the energy performance of future building research challenges (e.g., innovative envelope integrated technologies and strategies, new energy efficiency construction materials, real users' interaction with the building indoor environmental control systems, innovative building plants, etc.) [48,70,71].…”