IAQ 2016 Defining Indoor Air Quality: Policy, Standards and Best Practices Co-Organized by ASHRAE and AIVC

From substantial epidemiologic studies that have assessed the risks of passive smoking, it is well known that Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) exposure in indoor environments is a health risk to non-smokers and causes odor discomfort issues and respiratory irritation. Although ASHRAE and many other international institutions have determined smoking bans are the only effective control strategy to minimize the indoor ETS exposure (and its associated health risk) for non-smokers, there are still public places, such as entertainment venues, that are exempted from smoking bans. HVAC systems in such spaces require a significant amount of outdoor air (up to 30 ACH) to dilute ETS and to achieve the typical building code mandate, making them extremely demanding of energy. The use of an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) in such a setting has the potential to substantially reduce the energy cost of the ventilation system. This work investigates the influence of ETS on the performance of paper and polymer-based materials used in plate-type ERVs via accelerated ETS exposure tests.

Installation of continuous mechanical ventilation in residential buildings is becoming more commonplace, and is the primary mechanism by which compliance with ASHRAE Standard 62.2 is achieved. However, a common objection to this practice is that continuous mechanical ventilation may cause excessive ventilation at more extreme outdoor conditions when the cost of conditioning ventilation air is highest. The physics of stack-based infiltration are consistent with this concern, since at more extreme outdoor temperatures natural ventilation is highest. Therefore, there has been an interest in developing automated controls that account for outdoor temperature to adjust ventilation rates while still meeting core indoor air quality targets. Recent work done through a partnership of Building America teams PIRC and PARR with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has demonstrated the potential for a simple control to achieve this goal. This work included modeling of energy use and indoor air quality, along with field measurements of the performance of the prototype control and resulting IAQ metrics in pilot homes. This paper presents the results of this work.

The continued growth of the high rise residential building market in conjunction with the latest releases of energy codes demonstrates the importance of considering the design of mechanical and building enclosure systems on a holistic basis. Modern energy codes require air tight construction which can lead to problems with the ventilation strategies that mechanical system designers have historically used, specifically reliance on natural ventilation through either operable windows or “incidental air leakage”. This paper discusses the areas where building enclosure and mechanical systems have an important effect on one another including air quality, air pressure control, condensation, and energy. The paper also discusses how traditional ventilation strategies, including operable vents in fixed fenestration systems, can have unintended consequences.

Several severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreaks in the last 15 years have highlighted the issue of short range aerosol transmission between healthcare workers and the patients. Concerns about the ventilation system design in healthcare centres have become topical and important. To minimize the spread of contaminated air exhaled by patients within the shortest possible time, personalized ventilation - personalized exhaust (PE) system has been developed in this study. A typical consultation room which is ventilated by either mixing ventilation or displacement ventilation is designed in the experiment with an infected person (IP) seated 0.6 m away facing the seated healthy person (HP). Tracer gases N₂O were used to simulate the contaminated exhaled air from an infected person. While previous studies focus on the exposure amount and reduction of the infected person, this study, adopts the Evacuation Efficiency (ratio of tracer gas concentration at exhaust without PV-PE to the tracer gas concentration at the breathing zone of HP with or without the PV-PE) at the breathing zone of the healthy person as the evaluation index, focus on the evaluation of PV-PE performance.

In this paper some measures are presented of particle concentration and sizes, carried out in different wards of the Campus Bio-Medico University Hospital of Rome in the summer 2015. More specifically, some operating rooms (Day Surgery) have been taken into consideration together with the surgical block and the surrounding areas. Some experimental tests were carried out in the operating room in different simulated conditions of operation and with different particle counters. The results are related with different events (opening doors, switching on the operating light, movements of nurses and surgeons, etc.); attention is paid to different clothing of the staff.