English

The overall objective of the IEA EBC Annex 68” Project, “Indoor Air Quality Design and Control in Low Energy Residential Buildings”, has been to develop the fundamental basis for optimal design and control strategies for good Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in highly energy efficient residential buildings, and to disseminate this information for use in practice. The project was defined in 2015, the working phase lasted for the years 2016-19, and the project was concluded with publications on 2020.

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.

It is evident from the existing research that poor thermal comfort can adversely affect the health and productivity of the occupants. The analysis of thermal comfort is even more significant in the health care environments where the occupants are potentially more vulnerable due to poor individual health (patients) and/or extended exposure to such conditions (staff). This study focuses on the evaluation of thermal comfort in hospitals’ recovery rooms considering both health care staff and patients.

Cracks in building fabric lead to air infiltration due to wind and buoyancy driven forces. In the heating season, the cold air entering the building needs to be heated up to room temperature, thus leading to an energy demand. Conventionally, the measured infiltration rate at 50 Pa (expressed as n50 or q50) is recalculated into an average infiltration flow rate (yearly based) using leak infiltration ratio’s (LIR) ranging from 0.033 to 0.1, the origin of these values being sometimes unclear.

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).

Climate control of cabin aircraft is traditionally conditioned as a single unit by the environmental control system. Cabin temperature is controlled by the crew while passengers of the aircrafts have the control on the gaspers providing fresh air from the above head area. The small nozzles are difficult to reach and adjust to meet the passenger’s needs in terms of flow and direction. A more dedicated control over the near environment of each passenger can be beneficial in many situations.

Various field studies have shown that in a vast majority of European countries the quality of installed residential ventilation systems is poor, with a large proportion of systems having significantly lower installed flow rates than the required values, or having poor energy performance due to flaws in design, installation or operation. This paper analyses the potential impact of different policy options for an EU-level approach for inspection of stand-alone ventilation systems in residential buildings until 2050.

The means for keeping the indoor relative humidity (RH) and pollutant concentration below a threshold level of interests are necessary and essential to improving building performance in terms of indoor air quality (IAQ), energy performance and durability of building materials. In this paper, the similarity between the moisture and VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) transport models is applied to study the effect of toluene (a typical VOC) and moisture buffering capacities of a hemp concrete wall on indoor toluene concentration and RH.

New types of low-cost sensors have the potential to replace existing sensor networks in buildings, which have high cost and low flexibility in terms of monitoring local indoor environmental quality (IEQ) close to the occupants. The objective of this study is to (i) investigate the reliability, accuracy, robustness, and communication capabilities of low-cost sensor networks and (ii) develop and implement an overall framework of monitoring and control of indoor environmental conditions, embedded in existing control infrastructures or using new system typologies.

The fan pressurization method that is widely used to measure the airtightness of buildings is known to have quite large measurement error. It is made up of random measurement error (precision) and systematic measurement error (bias).