The TAIL rating scheme for assessing the quality of Thermal, Acoustic, Indoor air, Luminous, and the overall environment was initially developed to assess indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in hotels and offices. To broaden the use of the TAIL rating scheme to other buildings, its applicability for schools was studied. Two additional parameters, i.e., reverberation time and nitrogen dioxide concentration, were included to account for the specificities of the building use and population.

We sleep more than twenty years during our lives. Sleep is essential for physical and psychological health. Yet, nearly no standards define indoor environmental quality conditions for optimal sleep. In this paper, we present a summary of studies examining the effects of bedroom ventilation on sleep quality. The results suggest that the current ventilation standards for dwellings are inadequate concerning requirements of outdoor air supply rates in bedrooms and need to be revised.

The main focus of this paper can be summarized in terms of the following two presuppositions: i) The process through which we select and apply indoor-environmental quality (IEQ) constructs could be – perhaps should be – improved; ii) Such improvement would contribute to formulation of more robust IEQ standards and guidelines.

A Canadian provincial government has initiated a collaboration with the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) team of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) to conduct a controlled intervention study to determine the effectiveness of portable air cleaners (PACs) in reducing indoor air contaminants in 2 schools.

This research aims to evaluate ventilation performance on airborne transmission in buildings, by analyzing the effect of different ventilation configurations and flow rates on contaminant removal effectiveness

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns about indoor ventilation conditions worldwide. Monitoring CO2 concentrations in rooms has been widely used, but its relationship with outdoor air ventilation rates and ventilation performance is uncertain. Several uncertainties must be quantified, including the location and rate of CO2 sources, sensor locations, and the dynamics of the surroundings, as well as limitations of existing simulation models, such as well-mixing assumptions.

An approach has previously been developed to estimate space-specific carbon dioxide (CO2) levels that can serve as metrics for the adequacy of outdoor ventilation rates. These metrics are based on the CO2 concentration expected in a space given its intended or expected ventilation rate, volume, and occupant information (i.e., the number of occupants, their CO2 generation rates, and duration of occupancy).

Low energy buildings are highly insulated and airtight and therefore subject to overheating risks, where Ventilative Cooling (VC) could be a relevant solution in both existing and new buildings - being both a sustainable and energy efficient solution to improve indoor well-being, hereunder thermal comfort (State-of-the-art-review, Kolokotroni et al., 2015).
VC is widely used as a key element when designing buildings to cope with overheating to assist improving thermal comfort, but can also improve the Indoor Air Quality due to higher ventilation rates in the cooling season.

To achieve future-proof buildings, it is crucial to design buildings and systems that can withstand to shocks (like heat waves and power outages) and reduce the impact of shocks on thermal comfort in a building. This is known as resilience to overheating.

Overheating in school buildings is likely to lead to a negative learning performance experience for occupants in these settings. In Ireland, school buildings are primarily naturally ventilated, given the relative increases in external mean temperatures that are projected to have negative effects on the potential of natural ventilative cooling going forward, it is important to assess what the current overheating status is in these buildings. Existing work has already highlighted the lack of measurement data on overheating in low energy school buildings.