Airtightness in the Retrofit of Historic Buildings: Investigation of a retrofit strategy for historic traditional buildings, optimizing their energy-efficiency, indoor environment quality, and heritage preservation

Despite being a critical aspect in improving the building stock’s environmental performance and achieving the global environmental goals, the retrofit of traditional historic buildings is hindered by a lack of comprehensive guidelines tailored to their complex building physics and heritage preservation requirements. The conventional retrofit...

Human-Window Interaction in open-plan offices: Guiding occupants to improve window operation through window feedback systems

Occupants are often unaware of window opening strategies that can enhance their well-being and reduce energy consumption. Window feedback systems that indicate when to manually operate a window have become a strategy for enhancing the indoor climate, occupant’s satisfaction and energy efficiency. These systems are recognized for providing the...

Renovation of Proteus Eretes: Towards nearly zero energy building with high indoor comfort

One of the major risks to our planet today is climate change, which is a problem that worries people all over the world. There is a rise in global temperature levels and greenhouse gas emissions. The building industry has a huge share in this aspect. The current built environment accounts for almost 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2...

Optimizing office space utilization using an Indoor Air Quality sensor network

Sick Building Syndrome is present in 30% of all office buildings and can cause serious health damage over time. This is an era where sustainability and well-being are becoming dominant aspects of life. As a result, it is becoming increasingly important to businesses to invest in their employees' well-being and health. The VTTI group cares for...

Supporting residents to transition practices in zero energy homes

Residential housing has to become more sustainable to meet global energy goals (Silvester et al., 2017), yet the challenge is to integrate the refurbishments that reduce energy with the way people live. The context of this project is the 2ndSKIN project, which refurbishes houses to become zero energy. Zero energy houses are more airtight as a...

Empower people's perception of air and ability to improve indoor air quality

Air pollution is a widely accepted problem in today’s world. Nine out of ten people does not breathe healthy air due to rapid urbanization and human activities that cause increased severe air pollution. Over the years people have had a tendency to comfort themselves with everything they need inside. However, they may not be aware that the amount...

Residential ventilation concepts based on the idea of displacement airflow distribution

The thesis focused on the development of a residential ventilation concept based on displacement airflow distribution for balanced systems with heat recovery. Within the framework of this study, the thermally stratified ventilation systems and their ability to create better indoor air quality were researched thoroughly via the scientific...