Experimental Studies of a Pulse Pressurisation Technique for Measuring Building Airtightness

Experimental insights into the airtightness measurement of a house-sized chamber in a sheltered environment using blower door and pulse methods

“…Following this comparison study in a sheltered environment [34], continued comparison study, in an external chamber using the same units, has been carried out and reported by Zheng [66] with a slightly larger discrepancy, which suggests the weather condition is likely a contributor to that. More experimental studies based on the pulse technique, addressing the issues related with repeatability, comparison with steady pressurisation method and testing large buildings during the research and development, are summarised by Zheng [67].…”

“…the blower door is positioned in an opening in the building fabric, such as a door way), testing pressure differentials, which are significantly higher than those experienced in the ambient condition, coarse interpretation of wind effect and demand for skilful training. Such issues provided early motivation for finding alternative methods for measuring building airtightness, such as AC method [23][24][25], decay method [24,[27][28][29], Pulse method [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] and acoustic method [7,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44].…”

“…In this study, a novel low-pressure technique is used to measure the airtightness of an enclosed chamber in a sheltered environment for comparison against the standard blower door technique. Previous studies [32][33][34][35] have shown the pulse technique is a promising alternative for air leakage measurement, when applied to physical dwellings. In order to provide greater verification to the underlying pulse principle this study is performed in a sheltered environment to provide comparable testing, with near eliminated external effects due to wind etc.…”

Airtightness measurement of an outdoor chamber using the Pulse and blower door methods under various wind and leakage scenarios

“…A study based on the similar Pulse concept [27,28] has been undertaken to measure the effective leakage area of a test room but insufficient accuracy was achieved in comparison to the steady pressurisation method due to the inconsideration of either air compressibility or inertia effect of unsteady flow. Nevertheless, efforts have been ongoing to collate scientific evidence from both lab-based and in-situ research studies in an attempt to provide useful answers to those questions [29], with the historical and ongoing research focused on the theoretical study, numerical analysis and a considerable number of experimental investigations. As part of the investigations, the study reported herein aims to provide an experimental insight on how both testing methods correlate in the leakage measurement of an outdoor chamber in a range of leakage scenarios and also how the Pulse measurement is affected by artificially introduced steady wind.…”

“…Previous investigations related to the use of the Pulse technique are mainly focused on its proof of concept, validations of the Pulse prototypes at different developmental stages and its comparison with the blower door method in various testing scenarios [29]. The impact of environmental conditions on the measurement of building airtightness using the Pulse technique has been studied in a detached UK house over a year during which various environmental conditions were captured [ 38 ] and it was found that the measurement uncertainty lay within ±8%.…”