In many countries, most office buildings, and an increasing fraction of residential buildings, use mechanical cooling even when an optimized natural ventilative cooling (VC) system could meet cooling comfort and fresh air requirements. This five-day summer course will introduce students to the capabilities and limitations of VC using a design case study approach.

After 5 very successful editions of the Summer School on “Dynamic methods for whole building energy assessment” this time the focus will be on pragmatic application of these dynamic calculation techniques. For the practical exercises the software tool LORD will be applied on benchmark data as well as routines in the R-environment.

When and where?

The 38^th AIVC conference "Ventilating healthy low-energy buildings" was held on 13 & 14 September 2017 in Nottingham together with the 6^th TightVent conference and the 4^th venticool conference. There were 185 participants.

The conference consisted of 3 parallel tracks largely devoted to:

The current development in building energy efficiency towards nZEB buildings represents a number of new challenges to design and construction. One of these major challenges is the increased need for cooling in these highly insulated and airtight buildings, which is not only present in the summer period but also in the shoulder seasons and in offices even in midwinter.

The REHVA Brussels Summit will launch a new sequence of REHVA meetings offering an intense 2-days event with a new concept and a revamped visual design.

Work performed so far in the field of ductwork airtightness has shown that it may lead to important energy losses and increased fan energy use. Nevertheless, a recent survey has shown that ductwork airtightness does not seem to be taken into account (neither in regulation nor in energy performance programmes) in most European countries.

AIVC defines smart ventilation as a process to continually adjust the ventilation system of a building in order to provide the desired Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) benefits while minimizing energy consumption, utility bills and other non-IAQ costs (thermal discomfort, noise, etc.).

The objective of this AIVC workshop was to discuss and identify ways to improve the quality of our homes with respect to airtightness and ventilation, as well as discussing the impact suboptimal performance has on energy consumption and health of the occupants. Also of interest were the impacts of mandatory airtightness targets and how best to implement these, if at all.