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Many differences exist between countries in the requirements and regulations for ventilation of dwellings, offices, classrooms and other spaces. Sometimes the variation of the ventilation requirements for the same building type between countries is more than a factor of five. There are strong drivers, e.g., climate change, to reduce energy consumption for HVAC and therefore these variations are worth examining. Before reducing ventilation rates, it is critical to understand the reasons behind them.

The Book of Proceedings of the 42^nd AIVC - 10^th TightVent - 8^th venticool Conference: "Ventilation Challenges in a Changing World" held in Rotterdam, Netherlands on 5-6 October 2022

The Presentations at the 42^nd AIVC - 10^th TightVent - 8^th venticool Conference: "Ventilation Challenges in a Changing World" held in Rotterdam, Netherlands on 5-6 October 2022

Energy transition and digital transformation have become real performance drivers across all markets. But they also frequently raise complex questions when it comes to taking action. Digitization and technology to realize healthy, energy-neutral and circular buildings will ask for specialist knowledge for interesting markets. This will create great opportunities for our joint customers, employees and other stakeholders.  

The Performance 2 project (2020-2024) is a French national research project that aims to evaluate the robustness of Humidity-based DCV systems installed in two multi-family dwellings more than 10 years ago. This evaluation include analyses of results of measurements performed on the ventilation system and IAQ campaigns in 13 dwellings. As the emissions of indoor pollutants strongly depend on the occupant’s behavior, information is required regarding the activities and habits of the occupants during the IAQ campaigns. The occupants often judge this information very intrusive and too big.

Climate change is a growing global concern and building stock, in particular, is responsible for the emission of greenhouse gases, largely due to its poor energy efficiency. This problem is especially serious in educational buildings, where it is necessary to encourage energy efficient retrofitting under the parameters of nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB), an objective which in Europe has been set for 2050. This is expected to produce economic, energy saving, hygrothermal comfort and health-safety benefits.

Climate change is driving the construction sector to use of more environmentally friendly and sustainable materials. Hemp concrete has been recently adopted as an innovative solution by the building industry to reduce emissions, as this material stores more CO2 than the emitted during its production. Part of this storage occurs during its service life leading to a reduction of indoor CO2 levels. CO2 has been widely used as a proxy for evaluating indoor air quality (IAQ).

The energy performance of new and existing residential buildings needs to be radically improved to meet ambitious climate change goals and residential buildings are by far the largest component in the total building stock. A central boundary condition in constructing energy efficient buildings is doing so while maintaining a healthy, acceptable and desirable indoor environment.

The TAIL scheme was developed to rate buildings' indoor environmental quality (IEQ). The scheme was developed to assure that occupants' health and well-being are not compromised during deep energy renovation (DER) of office buildings and hotels, but it is expected that TAIL can also be used as a general rating scheme of IEQ in any building. TAIL combines the quality of Thermal, Acoustic and Luminous environment and Indoor air quality to determine the overall quality of the indoor environment.

Common metrics used for assessing air quality are based on guidelines and/or standards for regulating concentrations that should not be exceeded over a period. Exceeding those values would represent problematic situations. A lack of agreement on appropriate norms or standards deem this approach sub-optimal. Moreover, this approach does not relate a proportion of exceedance to specific health outcomes.