Papers by Flavio Foradini
This report summarises the work performed in Switzerland within the frame of the Joule II project... more This report summarises the work performed in Switzerland within the frame of the Joule II project "Indoor Air Quality Audit". Eight office buildings located in three important areas were audited.
Measurement of Ventilation Efficiency in a Retrofitted Conference Room
DAHU Diagnostics of Air Handling Units
Simulation Tool for Architects
The presented work offers an improved planning tool as a response to the demand for active and pa... more The presented work offers an improved planning tool as a response to the demand for active and passive solar architecture. An integral solution is presented for the design of solar assisted heating systems and decentralized electricity production using photovoltaics (PV) on building roof-tops and facades. The tools are applicable in the early stage of architectural planning and the underlying simulation is consistently usable throughout all further steps. In particular, this solution offers a number of sensible approximations at the beginning of the planning process and allows refining the input data at a later stage. The two software programs Lesosai and Polysun form the basis for the project. In a first step, a software interface is created which provides access to the simulation kernel of Polysun through the graphical user interface of Lesosai. Consequently, the architects do not have to install and learn to handle additional software next to Lesosai. Furthermore, no data has to ...
ATEMAC-Application des Traceurs passifs pour l" Etude des Mouvements d" Air et de Contaminants
MéDITA-Méthode de Diagnostic des Installations de Traitement d" Air-La méthode et ses résultats
HODA 2.0: a benchmark for rating buildings with regard to health comfort and enery use
ABSTRACT Information on the 69 office buildings and 97 residential ones investigated within the H... more ABSTRACT Information on the 69 office buildings and 97 residential ones investigated within the HOPE project is stored in the HODA database. This includes building characteristics collected by the building management according to a checklist, and responses of occupants to questionnaires asking their perceived comfort (thermal visual, acoustical and IAQ) and health (SBS and allergies). This database allows benchmarking any building with regard to building characteristics such as energy use, ventilation system, occupant density, perceived comfort, sick building syndrome, etc. The HODA database is presented including the way to compare other buildings with the buildings investigated in the HOPE project in order to characterise how healthy and energy-efficient they are.
RADIACONF: A design tool for locating and sizing radiant panels to improve comfort
ABSTRACT Thermal comfort depends on heat exchanges of the body by conduction evapo-transpiration ... more ABSTRACT Thermal comfort depends on heat exchanges of the body by conduction evapo-transpiration and convection to the air, and radiation to and from surrounding surfaces. Usual ways of sizing heating and cooling systems are based on homogeneous temperature in the room, and these devices are located using common knowledge. Such a design method is not well adapted to radiant panels, since a significant part of the heating and cooling is performed by thermal radiation, and one of the advantages of such panels is that they allow temperature differences in the room. RADIACONF is a computer design tool allowing drawing comfort maps in rooms heated or cooled with various devices, including radiant panels. It is based on the Fanger equation but also includes the discomfort specific to radiant temperature anisotropies. For the time being, this software is in French. Therefore, the paper is also in French.
Sick Building Syndrome and Building Characteristics
ABSTRACT Within the European research project HOPE, 64 office buildings were audited regarding in... more ABSTRACT Within the European research project HOPE, 64 office buildings were audited regarding in-door environment quality and building characteristics. Of those buildings, two groups are se-lected: 21 buildings with low prevalence of the sick building syndrome, and 21 buildings with the largest prevalence. However, none of these buildings was considered a priori as sick. Both groups are similar for age of occupants, type of work, ownership, external environment, outdoor temperature, orientation, and smoking policy. This study shows that large or tall buildings with low ceilings and high occupancy ratio are more likely to present a high build-ing-related symptom index (BSI). Noise sources may also influence the BSI, but no clear rela-tionship between pollution and BSI was found. Finally buildings with mechanical ventilation systems were shown to have on average a higher BSI, but there are buildings where the me-chanical ventilations system is well designed and maintained, which present a low BSI.
Des récupérateurs de chaleur sont installées dans de plus en plus d'unités de traitement d'air po... more Des récupérateurs de chaleur sont installées dans de plus en plus d'unités de traitement d'air pour diminuer la consommation d'énergie pour le chauffage et le refroidissement des bâtiments. L'efficacité nominale du récupérateur est souvent utilisée pour calculer l'énergie ainsi économisée. Toutefois, des fuites et des courts-circuits peuvent réduire considérablement l'efficacité de la récupération de chaleur. De plus, l'énergie électrique consommée par les ventilateurs peut s'avérer plus coûteuse que la chaleur récupérée. Le rendement de récupération réel a été mesuré dans 13 unités de traitement d'air. Dans les trois meilleurs cas, le rendement réel est compris entre 60 et 70% alors que le récupérateur seul a un rendement de 80%. Dans trois cas graves, le rendement global de récupération est inférieur à 10%, et la chaleur récupérée ne compense pas la consommation supplémentaire d'énergie primaire!
Designing healthy, comfortable and energy-efficient buildings: lessons from enquiries within the european Hope project
ABSTRACT Within the European research project HOPE, a multi-disciplinary study was performed in n... more ABSTRACT Within the European research project HOPE, a multi-disciplinary study was performed in nine European countries, by auditing 160 apartments and office buildings, of which half of them can be characterised as having low energy use. The investigating tools were a systematic inspection, interviews with the building management and questionnaire surveys of occupants. Using a multicriteria analysis method, a group of buildings perceived as healthy and comfortable and with low energy use as well as another group of high energy, perceived as less comfortable and healthy buildings were selected. Significant differences between these two groups of buildings have been identified. It can be concluded that high quality buildings that are perceived healthy, comfortable and have a good energy performance can be designed and built at will. These results, together with experience gained from former projects and literature lead us to present guidelines for creating such HQ buildings.
Creating healthy and energy-efficient buildings: Lessons learned from the HOPE project
ABSTRACT Within the European research project HOPE, 97 apartment buildings and 67 office building... more ABSTRACT Within the European research project HOPE, 97 apartment buildings and 67 office buildings - of which approximately 75% have been designed to be energy-efficient, and half of them are indeed - were investigated using checklists addressing the building characteristics and ques-tionnaires to the occupants asking their perceived comfort (thermal visual, acoustical and in-door air quality) and health (sick building syndrome and allergies). The analysis of the col-lected data, together with experience gained from former projects and literature lead us to pre-sent guidelines for creating healthy and energy-efficient buildings. These guidelines are pre-sented together with the rationale and facts on which they are based.
Correlation between SBS, perceived comfort, energy use and other building characteristics in european office and residential buildings
ABSTRACT Within the European research project HOPE, 67 office buildings and 97 residential ones w... more ABSTRACT Within the European research project HOPE, 67 office buildings and 97 residential ones were investigated using checklists addressing the building characteristics and questionnaires to the occupants asking their perceived comfort (thermal visual, acoustical and IAQ) and health (SBS and allergies). The collected data are compared looking for correlations between building characteristics on one hand, and perceived comfort and health on the other hand. Strong correlations are found between perceived indoor air quality, thermal, acoustic and lighting comfort, confirming results from other studies. Significant correlations between the perceived comfort and building related symptoms were also found, comfortable buildings being healthier than uncomfortable ones. Differences of perceived comfort or health between low- and high- energy buildings show that it is possible to design buildings that are healthy, comfortable and energy efficient.
Measurement of air flow rates and ventilation efficiency in air handling units
Within the European research project HOPE, 97 apartment buildings and 67 office buildings were in... more Within the European research project HOPE, 97 apartment buildings and 67 office buildings were investigated using checklists addressing the building characteristics and self-administered questionnaires to the occupants asking their perceived comfort (thermal visual, acoustical and indoor air quality) and health (sick building syndrome symptoms and allergies). More than 2700 questionnaires were collected in dwellings and more than 6000 in offices. Statistical interpretation of these individual questionnaires have shown several correlations between the presence of SBS symptoms or comfort complaints and the characteristics of the indoor environment.
Low- versus high-energy use buildings and mite allergens
Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 2005
Building Research & Information, 2006
In order to comply with sustainable development policy, buildings should be at least healthy, com... more In order to comply with sustainable development policy, buildings should be at least healthy, comfortable and energy efficient. Criteria for assessing the occupant's perceived health, the provided thermal, visual, acoustical comfort, the indoor air quality and the energy efficiency are known. This paper proposes a methodology to perform a global evaluation of a building with regard to all these criteria. This methodology is applied to 96 apartment buildings and 64 office buildings audited within the HOPE European project to sort, out of these samples, a set of best buildings and a set of buildings that are not acceptable in terms of comfort, perceived health and energy use. Significant differences between these two groups of buildings are presented. The very existence of the first set shows that it is possible to design and build office and apartment buildings that are simultaneously energy efficient, perceived healthy and comfortable.
Building Research & Information, 2006
Within the European research project HOPE, 96 apartment buildings and 64 office buildings -approx... more Within the European research project HOPE, 96 apartment buildings and 64 office buildings -approximately 75% of which designed to be energy-efficient -were investigated. The building characteristics were assessed according to a checklist during a walk-through survey. Questionnaires were given to the occupants regarding their satisfaction in terms of comfort (thermal visual, acoustical and IAQ) and their perceived health (Sick Building Syndrome and allergies). Buildingaveraged collected data are compared, looking for correlations between building characteristics on one hand, and perceived comfort and health on the other hand. Strong correlations are found between perceived indoor air quality, thermal, acoustic and lighting comfort, confirming results from other studies. Significant correlations between the perceived comfort and building related symptoms were also found, comfortable and healthier buildings being well distinct from uncomfortable ones. Differences of perceived comfort or health between low-and high-energy buildings show that it is possible to design energy efficient buildings that are perceived healthy and comfortable.
Bayesian method for estimating airtightness coefficients from pressurization measurements
Building and Environment, 1994
ABSTRACT A new method for processing pressurization data of a building is presented. The inverse ... more ABSTRACT A new method for processing pressurization data of a building is presented. The inverse problem theory is applied to the estimation of airtightness coefficients. The method, based on the conjunction of theoretical and experimental information, provides better confidence intervals than a classical least mean square fit method and allows one to take into account more sources of error. The airtightness coefficients are major parameters for predicting air renewal from weather data and they usually have very large confidence intervals whose reduction merits some numerical efforst.
Description of system configurations and model design, results and analysis for selected integrated RES/H2 systems and H2 end-uses, Deliverable 2
The higher penetration of renewable energy sources in islands is limited by its intermittent natu... more The higher penetration of renewable energy sources in islands is limited by its intermittent nature, and a solution to the problem requires energy storage. A promising storage technology is chemical storage in the form of hydrogen, which can then be used in fuel cells or ...
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Papers by Flavio Foradini