On Preheating of the Outdoor Ventilation Air

Abstract

The growing popularity of buildings with integrated sub-systems requires a review of methods to optimize the preheating of ventilation air. An integrated system permits using geothermal heat storage parallel to the direct outdoor air intake with additional treatment in the mechanical room as a part of building an automatic control system. The earth–air heat exchanger (EAHX) has many advantages but also has many unanswered questions. Some of the drawbacks are: A possible entry of radon gas, high humidity in the shoulder seasons, and the need for two different air intake sources with a choice that depends on the actual weather conditions. In winter the EAHX may be used continuously to ensure thermal comfort, while in other seasons its operation must be automatically controlled. To generate missing information about EAHX technology we examined two nearly identical EAHX systems, one placed in the ground next to a building and the other under the basement slab. In another project, we reinforced the ground storage action by having a heat exchanger placed on the return pipes of the hydronic heating system. The information provided in this paper shows advantages of merging both these approaches, while the EAHX could be placed under the house or near the basement foundation that is using an exterior basement insulation.

Air Enthalpy as an IAQ Indicator in Hot and Humid Environment—Experimental Evaluation

“…The air with the lower enthalpy is brought into the conditioning section of the air handler. This is an efficient method of control that can be used with the Earth Air Heat Exchanger, as presented in Reference [56].…”

Towards Characterization of Indoor Environment in Smart Buildings: Modelling PMV Index Using Neural Network with One Hidden Layer

“…. [1][2][3]5,7,[10][11][12][13]22,[27][28][29][30][31][32]34,35,[45][46][47]. The neural networks used in it introduce flexibility to the formulation of models describing comfort.…”

“…Thanks to this, one can talk about a kind of individual approach to the topic, while taking into account a set of features representing a given community. The described gap was noticed some time ago, thanks to which there is currently a flood of publications on this subject [1][2][3]5,7,[10][11][12]22,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][45][46][47]. It is worth quoting the work in [22], in which it is stated that the establishment of an individual thermal comfort evaluation is essential to achieving personalized thermal environment management.…”

“…A team of collaborating authors in the US and Poland address the issue of energy efficiency of modern buildings. The scope of work includes preheating of ventilation air [1][2][3][4], multi-criterial analysis [5,6], the development of an integrated approach, called Environmental Quality Management [7][8][9] in the context of building physics [10,11], fuzzy logic [12] or artificial neural networks [13,14]. The greater focus on neural networks (NNs) is justified by the observation that currently used energy and hygrothermal models are parametric and may not be suitable for application in real-time building of automatic controls [14,15].…”

“…In view of the indicated facts, in research environments, the subject of reducing energy consumption correlated with comfort issues is very popular [1][2][3][5][6][7][8][9][10][32][33][34]. It is worth mentioning, for example, the research presented in [34], which showed reduction in energy consumption when taking into account thermal comfort in controlling air conditioning temperature.…”