Holistic Approach to Green Buildings From Construction Material to Services

Attempts to adequately design an optimum HVAC airside system that furnishes comfort and air quality in the air-conditioned spaces with efficient energy consumption represent a great challenge. Air conditioning identifies the conditioning of air for maintaining specific conditions of temperature, humidity, and dust level inside an enclosed space. The conditions to be maintained are dictated by the need for which the conditioned space is intended and comfort of users. So, the air conditioning embraces more than cooling or heating. The comfort air conditioning is defined as “the process of treating air to control simultaneously its temperature, humidity, cleanliness, and distribution to meet the comfort requirements of the occupants of the conditioned space”. Air conditioning, therefore, includes the entire heat exchange operation as well as the regulation of velocity, thermal radiation and quality of air, as well as the removal of foreign particles and vapors. Achieving occupant comfort and health is the result of a collaborative effort of environmental conditions, such as: Indoor air temperature; relative humidity; airflow velocity; pressure relationship; air movement efficiency; Contaminant concentration; Illumination and visual comfort; and sound and noise; and other factors. In the holistic approach, the totality of the effects of the heat sink and sources in the building and the technical building systems that are recoverable for space conditioning, are typically considered in the calculation of the thermal energy needs. As the technical building thermal systems losses depend on the energy input, which itself depends on the recovered system thermal sources, iteration might be required. The present paper reviews the status quo and critically analyses the appropriate approaches to sustainability.