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This study aims to investigate and clarify the effects of roadside trees and automobiles on airflow distribution, turbulent diffusion of air pollutants and thermal environment within street canyons by means of the field measurements. The detailed field measurements were carried out at two streets with different densities of roadside trees and traffic volume in the central part of Sendai city, Japan. The microclimates and NOx concentrations as well as traffic volume were measured. The effects of roadside trees were investigated by comparing the results measured at the two streets. The results clearly showed that thermal environment has been improved but NOx concentration also increased simultaneously by the roadside trees. The more the number of moving automobiles were, the higher the NOx concentration was at the downstream of the circulating flow within street canyons due to the gas emission from automobiles.

This study is a part of the project that aims to construct the database for energy consumption of commercial buildings on the national scale. The purpose of this study is to obtain the basic data for energy consumption in the welfare facilities for the most of aged persons. The authors classified the buildings into two types of the residential and non-residential facility, and showed the attributes and energy consumption in each type. On the basis of these results, the factors that will have effect on the energy consumption for the unit of floor area in each type were clarified by the technique of multiple regression analysis. Furthermore, the relationships between the outside mean air temperature in each area and the monthly mean energy consumption in each facility were analyzed. After the monthly values of energy consumption were classified into the non-varied part through a year and the varied parts in summer and winter, the effect of the outside air temperature on each part was clarified by the multiple regression analysis.

In order to make clear the relationship between the chemical substances concentration and symptom of sick house syndrome, an investigation of 30 sick houses in Japan has been done for 8 years. Chemical substance concentrations show a decrease as the building age increases. However, there are some houses where concentrations increase due to low air change rate, use of moth crystals for clothes and new furniture. Because there was the case where the improvement of indoor air quality has relieved occupant's symptoms, it must be important to take measures such as ventilation frequently, non use of chemical products or use of low chemical products in the long term to treat “SHS”.

The aim of this study is to develop the measurement method of multi-zonal airflow rates via human expiration (CO2). The adopted method measures multi-zonal airflow rates based on system identification theory. Also, it is a simple and cost effective method that is suitable to apply in domestic places. In addition, the method will only have minimal interference in the daily life of the residents concerned. As a step toward the practical use of this measurement method, several experimental studies were carried out in a full-scale test house and an existing house in order to investigate the accuracy.

This paper presents the investigation of the prediction models for snowdrift around a building using CFD. Special attention is paid to prediction accuracy of the modeling for erosion and accumulation on snow surface. The computations are applied to the snowdrift around a cubic building model. The results obtained by CFD models are examined by the comparison with the results of the field measurement and the wind tunnel experiment. It is confirmed that the snowdrift patterns predicted by all proposed models correspond with those of the field measurement and the experiment. However, some differences are observed in the predicted snow depth near the building among the different modeling methods.

The purpose of this study is to make clear the energy saving potential of low-impact life style through the measurement of energy consumptioin in residential buildings. The actions for low-impact life style are “to control the heat loss or heat gain by using curtains and blinds”, “to set PC at saving energy mode” and so on. The results are as follows.(1) In one-person households, energy saving of 3.6-44.6% were achieved. Low-impact life style of air conditioning, lighting and information home appliances were effectively practiced.(2) In family households, 50-70% of whole subjects achieved 0.9-14.1% energy saving.