Assessment of wind impact on building air leakage measurements using a model scale experiment

Abstract

Nowadays, many countries include requirements for building airtightness in their current national regulations or energy-efficiency programs, mainly for concern about reducing building energy consumption due to air leakage. Moreover, more and more countries impose a mandatory justification with an air leakage measurement at building commissioning. Therefore, the uncertainty of the measurements results has become a key concern in several countries over the past year. More specifically, the influence of wind speed has been identified as one of the major sources of error on the measurement result. The goal of this paper is to present the experimental facility we design and built to improve the uncertainty estimates and the measurement protocol based on model scale experiments in controlled laboratory conditions. We first present the similarity criteria we identified for our model scale experiment. Secondly, we present the experimental design. Finally, we characterize the wind speed inside the wind tunnel and we present the preliminary results regarding the reproduction of fan pressurization tests on the model for different leakage distributions.