Program 1: Integrated Building Systems
This project aims to investigate how to mainstream high performance Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) in commercial buildings. The project will tackle this issue with three areas of work, which are to:
- Tackle the minimum energy requirements of the National Construction Code regarding energy consumption metrics for HVAC in commercial buildings.
- Investigate the current best practice of HVAC designs in Australian commercial buildings and communicate that to industry to raise standards.
- Investigate the five largest energy consuming components in a high performance commercial HVAC system and closely examine if there are opportunities for further improving current best practice.
Program
Project leader
Ian Dixon, AECOM
Project status
Complete
Project period
01/2017 to 06/2018
- Publications
- Partners
CRCLCL Project Reports
RP1033 - Mainstreaming High Performance Commercial Building HVAC - stage 2 report
This report presents a summary of the findings and activities of Stage 2 of the LCL-CRC research project RP 1033 “High Performance Commercial Building HVAC”. This research examined the HVAC design of a high performance commercial office building (hereafter referred to as the case study building) and compared its electricity consumption to that of a standard BCA compliant HVAC design for the same building. The main HVAC system designed and installed in the case study building as a low temperature VAV, air-water HVAC system, which is one of the most common designs currently utilised for commercial buildings. The case study building is based on a project completed by AECOM where they were engaged as both the Mechanical Services and ESD consultant. This study was used to gain a better understanding of HVAC design used in high performance buildings verses that required for minimum code compliance.
RP1033 - Mainstreaming High Performance Commercial Building HVAC - stage 2 report (3437455 PDF)
Peer Reviewed Research Publications
RP 1033: Mainstreaming High Performance Commercial Building HVAC - Stage 3 Report
This report presents a summary of the findings and activities of Stage 3 of the LCL-CRC research project RP 1033 “High Performance Commercial Building Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC)”.
Six strategies were found to be technically and economically cost effective in reducing the energy requirements of air handling units (AHUs) for a large commercial building HVAC system.
rp 1033 stage 3 final report (1569269 PDF)