Performance assessment of residential mechanical exhaust ventilation systems dimensioned in accordance with Belgian, British, Dutch, French and ASHRAE standards

Abstract

Sizing rules in residential ventilation standards lack uniformity in both methodology and resulting design flow rates. Additionally, mere comparison of design flow rates is case sensitive and, due to effects of infiltration, adventitious ventilation and occupancy, ill-suited to assess performance of an exhaust ventilation system with regard to the achieved indoor air quality and energy cost in terms of heat loss. This paper presents a multi-zone simulation based performance assessment of residential mechanical exhaust ventilation systems, using five common dwelling typologies and the sizing rules put forward in the Belgian, British, Dutch, French and ASHRAE residential ventilation standards. The performance of the different cases proved to be substantially different, with an occurrence of poor perceived air quality in 5% or less of the occupation time for the Belgian, Dutch and French standard, and about 15% for the British and ASHRAE standard. When the trade-off between indoor air quality and heat loss is considered, the cases with the Dutch and ASHRAE standard did not achieve pareto-optimal performance in comparison to the performances achieved by the other standards.

Uncertainty and sensitivity analyses applied to a dynamic simulation of the carbon dioxide concentration in a detached house

“…Although uncertainty and sensitivity analyses have been conducted by many authors on building energy performances [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11], few publications discuss the effect of input parameter uncertainties on residential building indoor air quality. Laverge et al [12] compared different mechanical exhaust ventilation systems in accordance with five standards on five different dwelling typologies. A probabilitybased approach was considered for several input variables (such as façade orientation, CO 2 production by occupants, number of occupants, and occupancy schedules).…”

“…These publications demonstrate the growing interest in residential building indoor air quality particularly under uncertainty. However, some studies considered closed windows and indoor doors [12,14], did not integrate input uncertainties [14], or were performed on a natural ventilation system [15,16].…”

“…However, CO 2 has the advantage of capturing the dynamic effect of occupant contaminant generation. Used by many authors [12,16,18,19], it also has the advantage of being a good indicator for bio-effluents acceptance [17] and consequently for the ventilation efficiency to exhaust this indoor pollution.…”

From the experimental characterization of the hygrothermal properties of straw-clay mixtures to the numerical assessment of their buffering potential

“…This is a consensus value which corresponds to most European standards and construction habits [63];…”

The Influence of the Bed with a Semiopen Hood on Bacteria Removal in a Negative-Pressure Isolation Room

“…The empirical correlations which were accurately fitting with the experimental data were provided for the designers. Recently, Laverge et al [19] present a multizone simulation based performance assessment of residential mechanical hood exhaust ventilation systems, using five common dwelling typologies and the sizing rules put forward in several residential ventilation standards.…”