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Museum storage buildings should be able to provide a considerable stable indoor environment in terms of temperature and relative humidity (RH). To obtain such stable conditions with the lowest possible energy consumption, passive air conditioning is one-way solution. In this paper, indoor environment facilities of a passive museum storage building in Vejle region in Denmark, are investigated. Results demonstrate that the weather conditions of the previous yearś considerably affect the indoor environment of the storage. What is more, concentrated dehumidification is a sufficient technique to maintain RH within acceptable levels. Therefore, renewable energy such us excess wind energy during the night can be utilized.

Museums keep and protect a part of our material cultural heritage for future generations; however the museums only exhibit a little part of their collections and most of the objects are kept in storage. Unfortunately the climates of many storage rooms are not ideal for keeping the chemical and physical decay of the objects as low as possible. Museum storage buildings should be able to provide a considerable stable indoor environment in terms of temperature and relative humidity. This paper explores how to simulate and build low energy museums storage buildings, and the paper shows that it is possible to make a building of low building expenses, very low running expenses and very high quality. In addition it is described that the energy consumption is only 2% compared to normal HVAC solutions, and the 2% can be delivered by excess wind power from Danish windmills resulting in that the building is close to be CO2 neutral. The analysis shows very good agreement between simulations and measurements, meaning that the proposed methods can be used for designing museum storage buildings. The analysis also shows, that the weather conditions of previous years, affect the indoor environment of the following years.

Despite the large economic and ecologic costs, museum storage spaces are often equipped with extensive air conditioning, to provide the desired stable interior climate. The new “passive conditioning” paradigm aims at resolving these costs: a high-hygrothermal-inertia building with a high-hygrothermal-resistance envelope is to satisfactorily stabilise that interior climate, with no need for mechanical air conditioning hence. This paper first studies the reliability of full passive conditioning for museum storage spaces. It is shown to be an illusion, since it usually results in excessive interior humidities. Auxiliary dehumidification is thus required to provide good conservation conditions, and it is secondly investigated how the dehumidification load can be diminished. The study reveals the crucial impact of air tightness, while thermal insulation only has a minor influence. To further reduce the economic and ecologic cost of conditioning, the paper finally assesses “concentrated dehumidification”: dehumidification during a part of the day only, while leaving the humidity free-running during the rest of the day. It is established that the hygric inertia of the interior air, building walls and stored objects keeps the fluctuations of the interior relative humidities to a minimum when considering adequately air tight museum storage spaces. ispartof: Energy and Buildings vol:56 pages:169-178 status: published