Performance analysis of the modern demand-based ventilation in Finnish apartment buildings

In general, new Finnish apartment buildings are equipped with mechanical balanced demand-based ventilation. The airflow rate in the kitchen hood is boosted on demand to improve pollutant extraction during cooking. The focus of the paper was to present the simulation results from a case building equipped with a such system. The airflow rates are calculated for the room and apartment for various ventilation mode scenarios in the analysis. A significant imbalance of over 10% between the supply and exhaust airflows at the room and apartment levels was observed in the boosting mode. This imbalance creates a pressure difference over the building envelope particularly in small studio apartments. A new solution to guarantee the designed airflow rates was proposed and assessed. The new design was able to stay within 10% of the designed airflow rates.