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Infiltration of unconditioned air through access openings and entrance doors with high recurrence can cause detrimental impacts to the energy performance, air quality and thermal comfort of buildings. Air curtains are of strategic importance to attenuate these negative impacts. In addition, air curtains are relevant in specialized HVAC applications for which the impediment of infiltration is also essential (e.g., reduction of smoke propagation in fire events, decrease of contamination hazard in clean rooms, preservation of refrigeration properties in cold rooms).

In the UK, people spend over 90% of a day indoors. On weekdays, when outdoor air pollution concentrations peak in the morning and in the late afternoon, people are usually either in non-domestic premises or on their way to/from non-domestic premises. Therefore, establishing the distributions of indoor air pollutant concentrations in non-domestic environments is essential to model human exposure to hazardous air pollution, especially for vulnerable populations, such as schoolchildren or patients in hospitals.

Ventilation systems assume that the outdoor air quality is better than the indoor air quality at al times as they use outdoor air to dilute pollutants emitted by humans, activities, the building itself and other objects. However, the outdoor air quality is not always as clean as assumed. Traffic, industry and agriculture can pollute the outdoor air making the outdoor air also a source of certain unhealthy pollutants indoors. This challenges the before stated assumption as in this case less ventilation would lower this source of pollution to the indoor environment.

Humidity-based DCV systems have been widely used in France for 35 years and are considered as a reference system, including for low-energy residential buildings. The on-going Performance 2 project delivers the preliminary results of a thirteen-year monitoring in thirty social housing apartments.

In building energy renovation, the notion of payback time of the investments is often presented as the only goal. However, the potential benefits in terms of health are also valuable despite being not consciously perceived by the occupant and may need to be monitored to be assessed. Laboratory-grade devices or protocols are generally burdensome and expensive, and the growing popularity of low-cost devices may contribute to the perception of health benefits at a larger scale.

The most recent version of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (v4.1) for Building Design & Construction provides three options for assessing the Daylight Credit. The first two options are based on computer simulation, whereas the third relies on physical measurement. Option 1 requires annual simulation of Spatial Daylight Autonomy (sDA) and Annual Sunlight Exposure (ASE).

Investigation of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) in various types of buildings is a rather intense research activity by recent years. IEQ refers to the acceptable levels of thermal, visual and acoustic comfort in addition to Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). In the proposed work, a systematic measurement campaign in university classrooms in the Educational School of the University of Western Macedonia, Florina, Greece, is presented; the campaign was performed by the end of the spring semester, in free-running classrooms.

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).

Air infiltration control is essential to guarantee thermal comfort, good performance of the ventilation systems, and more energy-efficient buildings. The evaluation of the global airtightness of the building envelope based on pressurization tests has been widely used combined with infrared thermography as a complementary tool to locate air leakage paths. This work proposes a new methodology whose main objective is the characterization of the air infiltration path using infrared thermography.

Green buildings incorporate several features to improve energy efficiency, indoor environmental conditions, and occupant satisfaction. However, studies have indicated that green-certified buildings do not always provide occupants with an acceptable level of satisfaction. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) requires that at least 80% of occupants are satisfied with the indoor thermal conditions.