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Natural Ventilation research has been continuing over many years at the Building Services Research and Information Association and started with developing computer programs to predict natural ventilation rates in buildings. The earlier work concentrated on predicting the natural ventilation performance of large hospitals whilst they were still at the design stage.

The Association was, more recently, involved in a contract from the Building Research Establishment to measure the natural ventilation performance of fourteen modern domestic dwellings in England and Wales. The air change rates, temperatures, wind speed and directions, air leakage characteristics of windows, doors and rooms were measured in each house for, on average, five week periods. If the air leakage characteristics of the windows and doors were used in the computer model the correlation between measured and predicted ventilation rates was notas good as may be expected. One major source of error was the large 'background' air leakage characteristic of the building shell.

Citation: Symposium, ASHRAE Transactions, Volume 85, Part 2, Detroit, MI