An Investigation on Natural Window Ventilation: Improving Indoor Air Quality and Energy Efficiency in an Office Building

Abstract

With the increment in time spent indoors, the contingence between building occupants and indoor air pollution has been lengthened. Accordingly, indoor air quality became a significant factor since the poor conditions can influence the occupants’ health and efficiency. Indoor air quality is mainly concerned with physical and thermophysical factors in conditioned environments and is related to occupants’ satisfaction levels on a variety of variables such as fresh air adequacy, air temperature, odor, humidity, and air velocity. This paper aims to investigate natural ventilation occupant-control methods to improve indoor air quality and increase building energy efficiency considering clean air intake levels and indoor air temperature levels. For this, variables related to climatic conditions, ventilation systems, and occupant’s control on window opening were investigated to provide healthy and liveable conditions. To comply with these goals, in an open-plan office building, the levels of indoor air quality were determined with the help of DesignBuilder simulation by comparing obtained values under different case modeling variations.