Scope
Energy-efficient ventilation is one of the main prerequisites to achieve the current energy performance requirements for buildings and to advance the building performance beyond the current minimum requirements. A smart ventilation system is able to continually adjust itself to provide the desired indoor air quality (IAQ) while minimizing energy use, utility bills, thermal discomfort and noise. A smart ventilation system is also responsive to e.g. occupancy, outdoor conditions, direct sensing of contaminants and can provide information about e.g. IAQ, energy use and the need for maintenance or repair.
Technically, all components for such systems are available in the market. Current practice in the design of ventilation systems, however, is driven by minimum requirements for IAQ, minimum energy use and/or investment costs. For midsized buildings, where the system complexity exceeds the typical ‘all-in-one-box’ solutions that are available for single-family dwellings, the design of ventilation systems is very conservative and inefficient. No method exists today to select the most optimal system and room layout in a specific building based on a coherent set of indicators for design optimization (i.e. indoor environmental quality (IEQ), energy use, life cycle costs, comfort, maintenance, resilience).To meet this need, we wantto determine a performance based method that approaches the design of a smart ventilation system as a whole, that is driven by optimization and assesses the performance of the system during its whole life-cycle. The focus is on new and renovated midsized buildings with a design minimum airflow rate of more than 1000 m³/h such as apartment blocks, schools, small scale health care facilities (e.g.elderly care homes) and office buildings . “Towards smart ventilation in midsized building” aims to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and its systems aiming at a decarbonised EU building stock, an essential step to achieve a climate neutral Europe by 2050 and as such to realize the European green deal. The specific scientific goals to be achieved and considered as criteria of success are:
The leap in knowledge is the performance based design approach of the ventilation system based on aggregated performance assessment using a range of advanced indicators and calculation methods (e.g. for aerolic design, acoustic design, LCC) and validated with experimental data. The output of this project will consist of:
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