Comparison of Finnish and Russian indoor climate requirements in residential buildings

People spend more than 80 % of their time indoor. So the indoor climate plays a very important role for human comfort and human health. The main factor indicating good indoor climate in residential premises is a big percentage of satisfied occupants. For the people to feel satisfied in the premises there are special requirements for indoor climate. The main factors that affect occupants are thermal conditions (air temperature, air velocities and air humidity), air quality, lighting and noise. In this work these parameters will be described and requirements for residential buildings will be shown. Finland and Russia have their own guidelines and standards for indoor climate. They are presented in special documents. The main document to describe Finnish requirements is D2 “Indoor climate and venti-lation of buildings regulations and guidelines 2010” /1/. This document is based on European standards, on different guidelines and general regulations, strength structure, insulations, heating, plumbing, air conditioning and energy economy, structural fire safety, general planning of housing, housing constructions. And the main document to describe Russian requirements is “Sanitary rules and norms 2.1.2.1002-00” /2/. This document is based on other different Russian documents such as “Sanitary rules for the content of localities”, “Hygiene requirements for air qualify residential areas”; on hygienic norm “Maximum permissible concentrations of pollutants in the air of populated areas”; on State standard “Residential and public buildings parameters of the indoor environment” etc. The requirements of these documents will be compared and the difference between them will be presented. Also the real situation of indoor climate in real buildings in both countries will be described. And a comparison of this information and conclusion will be shown. This thesis work has five main parts. The first part has information about indoor cli-mate in residential buildings, about effects caused by indoor climate factor on human health. The second part of this thesis describes climate factors: thermal conditions, air flows, air humidity, air impurities, light and noise. The third part covers the documents that give requirements for indoor climate in Finland and Russia. The values of these documents are presented in the tables. The fourth part is a comparison between Finnish and Russian requirements. The values of Finnish and Russian requirements are compared and combined in a common table. The differences between the values are detected. The fifth part describes the real situation of indoor climate in real buildings in both countries. And the results are compared. The conclusion provides an answer to the question: in which country real indoor climate is better and what are the reasons

Improving the (museum) indoor climate in a flooded castle

Amerongen Castle, built in de period of 1674-1680, is an acknowledged special national museum with a historic cultural value (Kanjerproject). Next to the monumental value of the building, it has a special collection that exists of for example a ‘Van Meekeren’ cupboard, a valuable atlas called ‘Amsterdam 1724’ and painted portraits of monarchs like Willem de Zwijger. The building and the collection are subject to deterioration. As a result of a flood of the river Nederrijn, the basement was completely flooded with water in 1993 and in 1996. This made the deterioration worse. For a period of approximately a year and a half ICN (The Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage) has been measuring the indoor climate in the castle. It appeared that the indoor climate was indeed not favourable for the conservation of the collection. The purpose of the work is to understand the effects of flooding of a monumental building, to understand the impact of visitors and the presence of hygroscopic materials on the indoor climate. Finally the indoor climate of the building should be improved. On the basis of the measurements made by ICN the indoor climate of the different museum rooms was mapped. For the judgement of the indoor climate several techniques have been used, namely the climate evaluation chart, the climate evaluations map and the climate evaluation tables. A simulation model has been used to study the effects of flooding, visitor impact and hygroscopic materials in several museum rooms of Amerongen Castle. Finally the model was used to predict the effects of additional heating. The indoor climate of the building has long been influenced by flooding in the past. Visitors of the mu-seum rooms nowadays influence the indoor climate with their heat and moisture production. Generally, the heat production of persons is normative for the relative humidity in the room compared to the moisture pro-duction. The result is a decrease of the relative humidity in the room and an increase of RH near the cold walls. It appears that the indoor climate also depends for a large part on the furniture of the room. It is sta-bilized by the presence of hygroscopic materials in the room (furniture, carpet, curtains, etc.). The library e.g. has a filled bookcase. The presence of these hygroscopic objects (books) in the library seems to be re-sponsible for the comparatively stable relative humidity, in combination with the use of a mobile dehumidi-fier. Two studied heating systems (humidistatically controlled heating and floor heating) will lead to a more favorable indoor climate. Floor heating will be applied in the basement and the hall and long corridor on the first floor (beletage) and the humidistatically controlled heating system in the remaining museum rooms. The results seem to be promisin

Indoor Occupancy Detection Based on Environmental Data Using CNN-XGboost Model:Experimental Validation in a Residential Building

Indoor occupancy prediction can play a vital role in the energy-efficient operation of building engineering systems and maintaining satisfactory indoor climate conditions at the lowest possible energy use by operating these systems on the basis of occupancy data. Many methods have been proposed to predict occupancy in residential buildings according to different data types, e.g., digital cameras, motion sensors, and indoor climate sensors. Among these proposed methods, those with indoor climate data as input have received significant interest due to their less intrusive and cost-effective approach. This paper proposes a deep learning method called CNN-XGBoost to predict occupancy using indoor climate data and compares the performance of the proposed method with a range of supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms plus artificial neural network algorithms. The comparison is performed using mean absolute error, confusion matrix, and F1 score. Indoor climate data used in this work are CO2, relative humidity, and temperature measured by sensors for 13 days in December 2021. We used inexpensive sensors in different rooms of a residential building with a balanced mechanical ventilation system located in northwest Copenhagen, Denmark. The proposed algorithm consists of two parts: a convolutional neural network that learns the features of the input data and a scalable end-to-end tree-boosting classifier. The result indicates that CNN-XGBoost outperforms other algorithms in predicting occupancy levels in all rooms of the test building. In this experiment, we achieved the highest accuracy in occupancy detection using inexpensive indoor climate sensors in a mechanically ventilated residential building with minimum privacy invasion

Reversible Self-Actuated Thermo-Responsive Pore Membrane.

Smart membranes, which can selectively control the transfer of light, air, humidity and temperature, are important to achieve indoor climate regulation. Even though reversible self-actuation of smart membranes is desirable in large-scale, reversible self-regulation remains challenging. Specifically, reversible 100% opening/closing of pore actuation showing accurate responsiveness, reproducibility and structural flexibility, including uniform structure assembly, is currently very difficult. Here, we report a reversible, thermo-responsive self-activated pore membrane that achieves opening and closing of pores. The reversible, self-actuated thermo-responsive pore membrane was fabricated with hybrid materials of poly (N-isopropylacrylamide), (PNIPAM) within polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) to form a multi-dimensional pore array. Using Multiphysics simulation of heat transfer and structural mechanics based on finite element analysis, we demonstrated that pore opening and closing dynamics can be self-activated at environmentally relevant temperatures. Temperature cycle characterizations of the pore structure revealed 100% opening ratio at T = 40 °C and 0% opening ratio at T = 20 °C. The flexibility of the membrane showed an accurate temperature-responsive function at a maximum bending angle of 45°. Addressing the importance of self-regulation, this reversible self-actuated thermo-responsive pore membrane will advance the development of future large-scale smart membranes needed for sustainable indoor climate control

Performance assessment methods for boilers and heat pump systems in residential buildings

According to the European Commission, 40% of the total energy use belongs to the buildings sector. That corresponds to 36% of CO2 emissions in the European Union alone. Currently, HVAC systems are the major energy users in the building sector. Therefore, there is a necessity to assess the performance of different energy/comfort systems in buildings. However, finding a way to mitigate the performance gap between the calculated and real energy use in dwellings is of great importance. In Flanders, the Energy Performance and indoor climate regulation (EPB) dates back to 2006. Since the building context related to energy demand has changed significantly over the past years, investigation on how to evolve building energy assessment method framework in the EPB regulation in Flanders by dealing with the current issues will be indispensable. In 2017, new EN52000 series of standards have been published, containing extensive methods of assessing the overall energy performance of buildings. The main focus of this article is to analyze the assessment methods for the energy performance of boilers and heat pumps for residential appliance by comparing methodology stated in respected Energy performance and indoor climate regulation in Flanders (EPB), EcoDesign regulations and EN52000 standard series. The aim for future research is to determine the parameters that mostly influence the performance and in a next step compare the predicted performance to real energy use

Applied design of an energy-efficient multi-layered membrane sheltering system

Within the research group of Product Development a low cost semi-permanent building system is developed with passive climate control for dairy cattle. The system proved to be successful and two new applications were found for the system; 1) an emergency community shelter and 2) a pig breading stable. Both new applications require a stable and comfortable indoor climate. To achieve such a indoor climate, a thermally active roofing system is developed to active acclimatize the inside conditions

Mimicking indoor climate dynamics and ammonia emissions in a pig housing compartment using artificial pigs and an automatic urea spraying installation

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Inclusion of window opening habits in a window model based on activity and occupancy patterns

The occupants’ window opening behaviour can have a substantial influence on the indoor climate and the energy use in low energy dwellings. In literature, most window opening models are based on outdoor and/or indoor climate variables. However a study of Verbruggen et al. [1] revealed that these models are not able to predict the window opening behaviour accurately in wintertime, which may be attributed to the presence of window opening habits. The occupants perform the habits not according to a fixed time step but rather to the performance of a reoccurring activity or an occupancy change. Therefore, a window opening model is generated based on the occupancy and activity patterns of the inhabitants. The model links certain behaviours to specific activities or moments in an occupant’s day without relating it to an exact time-step or specific weather conditions. Data on these habits and the links with occupancy are acquired from a survey conducted in a NZEB case-study project in Belgium. This paper includes the results of the habit-survey and explains how the window use model based on habits is generated. Based on the answers from the survey the window use in bedrooms and bathrooms could be fully defined for 93% of the households, only in the living room no complete window use profile could be defined. The developed model is able to predict the window use in a more realistic way compared to weather-models, with window opening actions linked to specific moments in the occupant’s day

On the performance of massive and woodframe passivehouses in Belgium : a field study

In this paper we present the results of a field study in which the indoor climate and the energy use for space heating in 6 passive houses in Belgium were monitored. The test group consisted of 4 houses with a massive shell construction and 2 timber frame houses. 2 houses were inhabited and 4 were used for promotional activities by the builders. The results are compared to the performance predicted by the PHPP method. We can conclude that the results are in good agreement with the predictions and that no significant difference in performance is found between the massive and timber frame constructions