A convertible, zoned ventilation system was field-tested in a modern, airtight Swedish home when occupied either by an experimental team or by a family. Indoor air quality in the master bedroom was monitored under four ventilation strategies. Relative to constant air volume strategies (CAV), demand-controlled ventilation (DCV) that was responding to CO2 concentration extracted more air when people were present, but less in total over 24 h. This elevated the indoor air humidity, beneficial in climates with dry winter air. Multiple monitors within the bedroom indicated that vertical CO2 stratification occurred routinely, presumably due to low mixing of supply air from a wall-mounted diffuse vent, spreading the air radially over the wall. This seemingly improved air quality in the breathing zone under local (ceiling) extract ventilation but worsened it during more typical, centralised extract ventilation, where air escapes the room via an inner doorway. The local extract arrangement thus seemed to yield both improved ventilation efficiency and reduced contaminant spread to other rooms. The noted air quality variations within the room highlight the importance of sensor placement in demand-control ventilated spaces, even in small rooms such as bedrooms.

Historical buildings account for a significant portion of the energy use of today’s building stock, and there are usually limited energy saving measures that can be applied due to antiquarian and esthetic restrictions. The purpose of this case study is to evaluate the use of the building structure of a historical stone building as a heating battery, i.e., to periodically store thermal energy in the building’s structures without physically changing them. The stored heat is later utilized at times of, e.g., high heat demand, to reduce peaking as well as overall heat supply. With the help of Artificial Intelligence and Convolutional Neural Network Deep Learning Modelling, heat supply to the building is controlled by weather forecasting and a binary calendarization of occupancy for the optimization of energy use and power demand under sustained comfortable indoor temperatures. The study performed indicates substantial savings in total (by approximately 30%) and in peaking energy (by approximately 20% based on daily peak powers) in the studied building and suggests that the method can be applied to other, similar cases.

The UNESCO world heritage “Decorated Farmhouses of Hälsingland” represent a well-preserved Swedish regional timber building tradition from the 18th and 19th centuries, featuring wall paintings of high cultural and artistic value. The houses have remained unheated and naturally ventilated over centuries, and have relatively leaky building envelopes. Recent indoor climate measurements and observations, however, have identified occasional condensation on indoor surfaces during unfavourable weather changes in wintertime. Such condensation poses a risk of degrading the wall paintings and other valuable objects, although low winter temperatures prevent mold growth. To mitigate condensation risk, sorption dehumidifiers – working also at temperatures below 0 °C – were installed in one of the UNESCO farmhouses during a winter season. The dehumidifiers were programmed to limit the indoor air relative humidity (RH) at maximum 80 %, and their dried air was distributed to all rooms via a flexible ductwork. Additionally, climate loggers and passive tracer gas technique were employed to measure temperature, RH, and air change rate in all rooms. By comparing with measured indoor climate in other similar farmhouses in the region, the results indicate that the dehumidifiers chiefly managed to limit RH at 80 %, thus preventing condensation in all rooms, despite a relatively high mean air change rate of around 0.8 ACH. However, locally and temporarily, enhanced RH peaks occurred, possibly due to unfavourable transient wind and/or stack conditions. The study also provides some practical installation guidance.

Raw data will successively be uploaded here for the study "Wind tunnel and numerical study of wind pressure coefficients on amedieval Swedish church".

Air infiltration has great importance regarding energy, comfort, moisture and dust deposition in naturally ventilated historical buildings like churches. In these buildings, air infiltration is driven by stack effect and wind. When assessing the wind effect, reasonable estimation of wind pressure coefficients is crucial. Local wind pressure coefficients are significantly affected by the shape of the building and turbulence generated by its geometrical features, which – for moderately large churches – typically consist of main building body and window recesses, gable roof, tower, apse, and sacristy. To yield practically useful pressure coefficients, this study conducted wind tunnel and numerical investigations at a church, with gradual addition of these features. Wind pressure was measured on a small-scale model in a wind tunnel, while computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were carried out for both small-scale and full-scale models. By comparing the experimental and numerical results, the SST k–ω turbulence model showed the best accuracy, yielding CFD results in good agreement with wind tunnel measurements. Most challenging was predicting the strong negative wind pressures occurring on a flat roof. Building structures like tower, apse, and sacristy had significant impact on the wind pressures on the central, main building body. This study adds knowledge on wind pressure effects by commonly occurring building components, with particular reference to churches and similar buildings. It was an important basis for developing further models for calculating the wind pressure coefficient.

One of the most important aspects of working in an office environment is ensuring that the space has optimal thermal comfort and an indoor environment. The aim of this research is to investigate the thermal comfort and indoor climate in three office rooms located at one of the campus buildings at the University of Gävle, Sweden. The evaluated period is in the month of April during springtime. During this period, parameters such as temperature, relative humidity, CO2, supply air flow rate, and room air velocities are measured on site. The results of the measurement show that the indoor temperature is on average lower in the rooms facing north, at 21–23.5 °C, compared to the rooms facing south, which reach high temperatures during sunny days, up to 26 °C. The results also show that the ventilation air supply rate is lower than the requirement for offices in two of the office rooms. The ACH rate is also low, at ≈ 1 h−1 for all the rooms, compared to the required levels of 2–4 h−1. The CO2 levels are within the recommended values; on average, the highest is in one of the south-facing rooms, with 768 ppm, and the maximum measured value is also in the same room, with 1273 ppm for a short period of time.

In local exhaust ventilation systems, external turbulence from e.g. human movements can affect the capture efficiency of the system considerably. In this study, experimental and numerical (CFD) approaches were utilized to evaluate the effect of human movement on the capture efficiency of a local exhaust ventilation system with an exterior circular hood. Human movements were simulated by back-and-forth movements of three human-sized moving objects: a flat plate (CFD + experimental), a cylinder (CFD) and a human-shaped manikin (CFD), respectively. The experiments consisted of tracer gas measurements in a full-scale test room. The numerical simulations included dynamic mesh methods to handle object movements. The results showed reasonable agreement between numerical and experimental results regarding the capture efficiency at different movement frequencies and exhaust flow rates, indicating that CFD is a feasible method for investigating complex flows of the studied kind. In comparison with the moving manikin, the moving plate caused significantly lower capture efficiency, whereas the moving cylinder yielded higher values. Overall, the results with the cylinder as moving object proved more similar to those of the manikin than the results with the flat plate. These findings have particular relevance towards existing test standards that stipulate the use of a moving flat plate in similar test situations. Further, some parameter variations verified that local exhaust capture efficiency increases by increasing the exhaust air flow rate and movement time interval, and also by decreasing the distance between contaminant source and exhaust hood opening. Also increasing the distance between the movable object and the contaminant source, as well as decreasing the diameter of the exhaust hood opening increased the capture efficiency.

A field study conducted in a modern Nordic single-family house with high airtightness and insulation levels, attempted to control summer indoor overheating using night-time cooling strategies. Exhaust air flow rates were manually scheduled by the researchers (based on weather forecasts), analogous to what an engaged occupant - or a predictive system - might do. Air temperatures at a nearby meteorological station peaked at 30 °C during 6 days in June that saw only 44 hours below 18 °C. Temperatures recorded indoors at the test house reached 32 °C, due also to very large solar gains, and never fell below 26 °C over 8 continuous days. It appears that under extended heat conditions that are exceptional now, but foreseen to become more frequent, some modern Nordic homes cannot be temperature controlled by ambient ventilation alone.

The movement of people and other objects indoors may affect airflow patterns and velocities near local exhaust ventilation hoods, and consequently has influence on the hoods’ ability to remove locally emitted contaminants and on ventilation energy requirements. In this study, such disturbance effects have been studied experimentally and numerically, with the movements consisting of a human-sized plate, cylinder and detailed manikin, respectively, making back-and-forth movements near an exhaust hood. In the experimental part of the study, a 3-D sonic anemometer was used to measure air velocity in front of the hood opening. The numerical simulations used dynamic mesh to handle object movements. The numerical results were validated against the experimental ones and yielded supplementary results on the air flow field. The results show that the turbulence produced by the objects movements included marked air velocity peaks – both assisting and impeding the suction flow – in the near field of the exhaust hood. The generated turbulence, and particularly those peaks, proved substantially larger in the case of plate movement than with cylinder and manikin movement. Overall the results indicate that a moving cylinder represents human movement better than a moving plate, and thus that it’s better to use a cylinder in some test standards that now stipulate a plate as moving object. A Percentage of Negative Velocity (PNV) parameter was introduced for assessing the capture efficiency of the local exhaust system. The PNV represents the percentage of time that the air flow is directed away from the exhaust hood in an imagined point of contaminant release. The study includes test cases where the PNV values were significantly above zero, suggesting a strong effect on the capture efficiency of the exhaust hood. Human induced turbulence that cause such reverse air flows and overall impedes hood suction may be counteracted by enhanced exhaust flow rate, but then at higher energy consumption.

Field calibrations of NO₂, NO, and PM₁₀ from AQMesh Air Quality Monitors (AQMs) were conducted during a summer and an autumn period in a busy street in a midsize Swedish city. All the three linear calibration procedures studied (postscaled, bisquare, and orthogonal data) significantly reduced the ranges and magnitudes of the performance indicators to yield more reliable results than the raw data. The improvements were sufficient to satisfy the European Union (EU) Data Quality Objective (DQO) for indicative measurements as compared to reference data only for NO₂ (above 50 µg m^-3) and NO (above 30 µg m^-3) during the autumn calibration period. The relatively simple bisquare procedure had the best performance overall. The bisquare procedure improved the root mean square error by the same amount as other studies using complex multivariate calibration methods. Low concentrations of pollutants were measured, far below the EU Environmental Quality Standard thresholds and even satisfying the future goals for the Environmental Quality Objectives. Cleaning the raw data by removing data points in the reference data that were below the reference station limit of detections (and the synchronous data points in the AQM prescaled data) was found to improve the performances of the calibration procedures appreciably. Many NO₂ and almost all PM₁₀ data points in this study fell below the AQM limit of detection. These low concentrations will probably be a common problem in many field studies, at least in areas with relatively low air pollution. However, the relative errors were sufficiently low for these data points that they could be interpreted as accurately representing low concentrations and did not need to be removed from the datasets. For the NO₂ measurements, a slight periodic error correlated with sunlight and increased ambient temperature was noted. NO measurements correlated strongly with increased traffic.