Design and performance assessment of a high efficiency facade-integrated ventilation unit with membrane-based enthalpy exchanger

Ventilation-related heat and moisture losses can represent a significant share of total heating and cooling demands. Conventional centralized heat recovery systems are often difficult to implement in retrofit contexts. In this study, a novel façade-integrated decentralized ventilation unit based on a membrane-based total heat exchanger with a patented honeycomb separator is designed, experimentally evaluated in a full-scale test cell under real operating conditions to quantify sensible, latent, and enthalpy recovery performance. A coupled heat and mass transfer numerical model is developed in MATLAB, calibrated and validated against experimental data, and subsequently integrated with a whole-building EnergyPlus model through run-time co-simulation to assess building-scale energy impacts. Experimental results demonstrate sensible effectiveness values up to 82%, latent effectiveness up to 68%, and enthalpy effectiveness in the range of 60–70%, while maintaining a low pressure drop suitable for decentralized operation. Building-scale simulations show that the proposed system can reduce ventilation-related sensible and latent energy loads by approximately 70% and 55%, respectively. These results demonstrate that this system represents an effective and practical solution for reducing ventilation energy losses in building retrofit applications, offering simultaneous heat and moisture recovery with significant potential for improving building energy efficiency.