indoor environment

Healthy Buildings has become the marketing focus, if not the goal, for an increasing number of projects and organizations in the past five years. The current COVID-19 pandemic has placed a new and compelling spotlight directly onto buildings of all types, whether offices, homes, retail, restaurants, hotels, or schools. The issues are no longer limited to the functional parameters of the building design, construction, maintenance, and use.

Today, more than 26 million European children are living in unhealthy homes putting them at higher risk of experiencing health problems. Good air quality, sufficient access to daylight and adequate ventilation are important for creating a healthy indoor environment in any home, with the effects reaching far beyond childhood. Our research is based on analysis of the Eurostat microdata from the EU-wide survey “Income and Living Conditions in Europe” (EU-SILC).

Most existing office buildings are equipped with indoor environmental quality (IEQ) sensors that are connected to the Building Management System (BMS) and provide feedback to the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC). Unfortunately, they are often installed in locations selected based on practical reasons rather than for reliable representation of IEQ at actual workplaces. This leads to a difference in the IEQ sensed by the BMS and the occupants, resulting in increased complaints and decreased occupant satisfaction.

Improving actual operation performance of room air conditioners (RAC) shows great importance in the indoor environment and building energy conversation. The installation height and supply air angle of the indoor unit of RAC directly affect thermal comfort and energy performance in heating conditions. In this paper, a combined simulation of building, indoor air distribution, and performance of RAC is proposed to investigate the influence of installation height and supply air angle. The combined simulation model was validated by experiment results.

Heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems attempt to achieve a uniform indoor environment. However, this can be challenging, because the placement and control of HVAC systems and sensors are affected by many unpredictable factors. The efficacious exploitation of this nonuniformity can lead to an improvement of indoor environment around occupants. Of the many indoor environment variables, we focused on the CO2 concentration associated with ventilation.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the respiratory characteristics and productivity with wearing a mask, and to propose the indoor control strategy to maintain the thermal comfort. With the worldwide spread of biological hazards including COVID-19, it has become common to wear a mask as a countermeasure against infection in public places. Because of this influence, it is necessary to take measures against health hazards caused by wearing a mask (increased respiratory load and oxygen poverty due to wearing a mask for a long time, heat stroke in summer).

People spend approximately 90% of their time within indoor environments, and consequently, characterizing the chemistry of indoor air is valuable from a human health perspective. A simple-to-run indoor air chemistry model is needed as an initial screening tool for public health applications. The Simplified Indoor Air Chemistry Simulator (SIACS), which is currently in development by EPA, incorporates 78 chemical species with 211 chemical reactions and aims to fit this need.

In this study, questionnaire survey and field measurement were conducted for the houses with the elderly in urban and rural areas across 6 regions of China, during heating period. As the results, the prevalence of hypertension was found around 40% in both urban and rural areas. In the northern regions, the room temperature in urban residences was stable at around 20°C, and in rural areas this temperature rarely reached 20°C but it fluctuated greatly.