indoor air quality

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the awareness and importance of infectious pathogens as contaminant in the indoor air, especially for non-residential buildings with a high occupational density like schools. During the COVID-19 pandemic air cleaning is often proposed as mitigation strategy for infectious risk in these types of buildings. However, indoor air quality (IAQ) in general comprises of a large range of possible contaminants and factors that can equally impact the health, comfort and well-being of occupants.

Personalized Environmental Control Systems (PECS) have advantages of controlling the localized environment at occupants’ workstation by their preference instead of conditioning an entire room. A new IEA EBC Annex (Annex 87 - Energy and Indoor Environmental Quality Performance of Personalised Environmental Control Systems) has recently started to establish design criteria and operation guidelines for PECS and to quantify their benefits. This topical session will provide an introduction to the objective/scope, activities, and intended outputs of the annex.

The scientific community has been aware of the importance of indoor air quality (IAQ) for many decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a significantly higher level of attention from the general public and governmental entities to this theme. However, IAQ comprises hundreds of other parameters besides infectious pathogens, many of which can equally impact the health, comfort and well-being of occupants.

Most New Zealand schools are designed to be naturally ventilated, using openable windows (Ministry of Education Design Quality Standard Guidelines). Furthermore, they must meet the New Zealand Building Code Clause G4 - Ventilation. Clause G4 requires the “net openable area of windows in a classroom to be no less than 5% of the combined habitable floor area to achieve sufficient ventilation”. Although they are designed to code, there is no end-user operational or systems requirement for them to be opened.

Smart ventilation which provides air renewal thanks to its variable airflows adjusted on the needs can improve both indoor air quality (IAQ) and energy performance of buildings. However, such performance gains should be quantified with performance-based approaches. In this paper, we propose to extend the performance-based approach with a robust methodology to rank the ventilation systems performance. Such a methodology could be used in a decision-making tool at the design stage of buildings.

Metal Oxide Semiconductor (MOS) sensors measuring Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) seem to be an obvious step towards broadly available Demand Controlled Ventilation (DCV). The previous research shows that MOS VOC sensors can detect high pollution events such as cleaning, painting, or high occupation density. These abilities seem to make MOS VOC sensors suitable to complement ventilation control systems, especially concerning residential ventilation.

Chile has 1,626 social housing complexes with a total of 350,880 dwellings. Several studies have demonstrated a low thermal performance and high air permeability of the envelope of social houses throughout the country, causing surface condensation on walls, high heat losses in winter and low levels of thermal comfort for their occupants. The presence of high levels of indoor pollutants and/or indoor humidity has also been observed, causing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in the occupants.

Mass gathering events were closed in 2020 to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2. These events included music concerts, theatre shows, and sports matches. It is known, however, that the long-range aerosol transmission of pathogens, such as SARS-CoV-2, can be reduced with sufficient ventilation indoors. This paper examines the risk of reopening these mass gathering events by measuring the CO2 concentration, as a proxy for ventilation effectiveness, at 58 events, with a specific focus on small enclosed spaces with short occupancy.

With many existing Austrian school buildings to be renovated in the coming years, there are debates between stakeholders, about which ventilation strategy to pursue in existing schools. Therefore, different intervention strategies such as retrofitting ventilation systems, installing CO₂-monitoring signals, or raising awareness among teachers and students should be evaluated. This paper presents the preliminary results of the project “DIGIdat” on air quality measurements in the first quarter of 2023.

In recent years, earth-to-air heat exchanger (EAHE) systems, which is a method of pre-cooling and pre-heating outdoor air with earth-to-air heat, have been attracting attention as one of the technologies to achieve ZEB. However, at the operational phase, in order to achieve both energy saving and suppression of dew condensation control, EAHE control methods such as the timing or amount of outdoor air introduction have not been established.