Building air leakage analysis for individual apartments in North China

Abstract

There is little known on the airtightness performance of apartment building in China. The present study intends to investigate the airtightness performance of twelve individual apartments from four buildings in China's cold area using the blower door method. The air leakage of two building components of each of the three individual apartments from the 4# building was further investigated by a series of blower door tests. The normality test was performed to the test results, and the correlation coefficients between the air leakage and possible influence factors were analyzed.Test results show that the air change rate of the tested individual apartments at 50Pa changes from 1.14 h−1 to 2.44 h−1 with an average of 1.77 h−1. The check valves at the inlets of the discharge flue and exhaust airway were tested to be leakier than the outer windows and doors in the three measured apartments from the 4# building. Results of statistical analysis show that the data was significantly drawn from a normally distributed population at the 0.05 significance level, and the envelope area and the joint length of the opening part of the windows and doors were identified as the main factors that influence the air leakage of the tested apartments at the 0.05 significance level.