Indoor exposure to contaminants should be minimized to avoid adverse health and comfort effects. Experience shows that this qualitative statement is difficult to translate into measurable terms, such as performance indicators or metrics, which can be used as a basis for defining and assessing requirements in regulations and standards while holistically reflecting indoor air quality. The simplest and most commonly used approaches rely on ventilation airflow rates determined by experts or codes.

The objective of this workshop was to discuss and identify ways to improve the quality of installed insulation systems as well as to (better) secure the compliance of product and system data, thereby increasing the confidence in declared values on the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) and achieving the expected energy performance. Three aspects were more specifically addressed:

There is a trend to perform more ventilation and air infiltration measurements in buildings, either to strengthen commissioning procedures or to learn from field data. This trend is stronger in nearly zero-energy buildings projects or programmes given the significant share of ventilation and infiltration losses on total building energy use. 

This workshop focused on the impact, compliance and control of energy legislations. Through a series of well structured country presentations, the view of various European associations, synthesis presentations and a panel discussion gave the participants a clear view as well as indications of interesting approaches.

More specifically, the workshop focused on the following issues:

The aims of the workshop were:

• to inform interested parties (industry, regulators,…) of the latest changes in national building ventilation markets, with an attention not only for IAQ and energy issues, but also on airtightness and assessment of innovative systems issues,
• to identify the drivers for changes,
• to discuss the status in a round table with industry representatives.

The workshop aimed to answer to the following kind of questions:

The 40^th AIVC conference  was held on 15 and 16 October 2019 in Ghent, Belgium. It was also the 8^th TightVent conference and the 6^th venticool conference.

Conference Scope

In the past 40 years, since the first oil crisis in the seventies, energy and climate goals have been shaping many countries´ policy and legislative agendas. The building sector plays a crucial role in achieving these goals, considering the energy use attributed to buildings and its huge potential for improved energy performance.

The current development in building energy efficiency towards nZEB buildings represents a number of new challenges to design and construction. One of these major challenges is the increased need for cooling in these highly insulated and airtight buildings, which is not only present in the summer period but also in the shoulder seasons and in offices even in midwinter. Ventilative cooling can be an energy efficient solution to address this cooling challenge in buildings. 

The 9th AIVC Conference - Effective ventilation, was held in Ghent, Belgium, 12-15 September 1988. 

Adequate ventilation as well as good envelope and ductwork airtightness represent a specific challenge for new or renovated nearly zero-energy buildings. Alone, they can represent over 50% of a building's total space heating (or cooling) needs, and their share often increases with increasing energy performance.

This is the reason why many issues have arisen in the past few years regarding regulatory and voluntary initiatives to improve envelope and ductwork airtightness, bringing forward apparently simple questions such as:

In order to reduce the energy use of buildings, policy makers impose stringent requirements with regard to energy performance of new buildings and renovated buildings, and the use of renewable resources. Most compliance checks and labelling of the energy performances of buildings are done in the design phase by calculating the theoretical energy use. But, despite regulation and policy enforcements, monitoring of actual energy performances reveals in many cases a significant gap with theoretically designed targets.