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Impact of COVID-19 Pandemics on Buildings’ Energy Consumptions and Indoor...
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Impact of COVID-19 Pandemics on Buildings’ Energy Consumptions and Indoor Environmental Quality: Current Issues and Future Needs

A special issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309). This special issue belongs to the section "Building Energy, Physics, Environment, and Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 August 2022) | Viewed by 11594

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Fabio Fantozzi

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Energy Systems Territory and Construction Engineering, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Interests: heat transfer; renewable energy; energy efficiency; indoor comfort; building energy simulation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Ms. Giulia Lamberti

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor Assistant
Department of Energy Systems Territory and Construction Engineering, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Interests: thermal comfort; indoor environmental quality; thermal stress; indoor air quality; environmental analysis; sustainable architecture; built environment

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Today, the need for ensuring healthy indoor conditions is becoming increasingly relevant, as people spend most of their time indoors and, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, this necessity became even more evident. The increased demand for ventilation to reduce the infection risk led to increased use of HVAC systems to maintain adequate indoor conditions, which has consequences for energy consumption. 

There is a necessity to analyse the problems related to Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), reduction of the infection risk, and energy consumption, all of which will be crucial in the post-pandemic period. Potential research issues are focused on, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Integration between IEQ and energy-related issues;
  • Impact of enhanced IEQ on energy consumptions;
  • Use of HVAC systems to decrease the infection risk and improve IEQ;
  • Effect of people’s behaviour on IEQ and energy consumptions;
  • Role of ventilation on reducing the infection risk and improve indoor conditions;
  • Strategies to minimize airborne transmission of diseases;
  • Designing safe and healthy buildings.

Prof. Fabio Fantozzi
Ms. Giulia Lamberti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • energy consumptions
  • HVAC systems
  • ventilation
  • indoor environmental quality
  • airborne transmission
  • COVID-19

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 898 KiB  
Article
Effects of Working from Home on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the Associated Energy Costs in Six Australian Cities
by Satheeskumar Navaratnam, Amitha Jayalath and Lu Aye
Buildings 2022, 12(4), 463; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12040463 - 08 Apr 2022
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 3312
Abstract
Working from home (WFH) has been imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The adoption of WFH impacts energy use in the residential, commercial, and transportation sectors. Consequently, this affects the greenhouse gas emission (GHGE) and the associated energy costs to workers and employers. [...] Read more.
Working from home (WFH) has been imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The adoption of WFH impacts energy use in the residential, commercial, and transportation sectors. Consequently, this affects the greenhouse gas emission (GHGE) and the associated energy costs to workers and employers. This study estimates the effects of WFH on the GHGE and energy-related costs in the residential, commercial, and transportation sectors. A simple linear model was used to estimate the changes in the GHGEs and cost by a typical employee when WFH practice is adopted for 1.5 and 4 days per week. The adoption of WFH reduces the operational GHGE accounted for commercial buildings and transport. However, it increases the operational GHGE accounted for residential buildings, which is a maximum of about 6% and 12%, respectively, for WFH 1.5 and 4 days. The reduction of GHGE from transport is significantly higher than that of residential buildings. The GHGE reductions from the transport sector are about 30% and 80%, respectively, for WFH 1.5 days and 4 days per week. WFH for 1.5 and 4 days per week reduces the national annual GHGE by about 1.21 Mt CO2-e and 5.76 Mt CO2-e, respectively. Further, the annual transportation cost of an employee is reduced by 30% and 80% in each city when the employee WFH for 1.5 and 4 days per week. The outcomes of this study offer a direction to reduce energy consumption and related costs and potential future research avenues on this topic. Further, the findings also help policymakers develop a hybrid work model for the post-COVID-19 pandemic. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Impact of COVID-19 Pandemics on Buildings’ Energy Consumptions and Indoor Environmental Quality: Current Issues and Future Needs)
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14 pages, 1733 KiB  
Article
Household Water and Energy Consumption Changes during COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdowns: Cases of the Kazakhstani Cities of Almaty, Shymkent, and Atyrau
by Aidana Tleuken, Galym Tokazhanov, Aray-Bibi Serikbay, Kuanysh Zhalgasbayev, Mert Guney, Ali Turkyilmaz and Ferhat Karaca
Buildings 2021, 11(12), 663; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11120663 - 18 Dec 2021
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3077
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the daily behaviors of people by forcing them to spend the majority of their time in their residences, particularly during social distancing measures. The increased time spent at home is expected to influence, among other things, the daily [...] Read more.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the daily behaviors of people by forcing them to spend the majority of their time in their residences, particularly during social distancing measures. The increased time spent at home is expected to influence, among other things, the daily consumption of utilities: specifically, water and energy. A prolonged presence of residents at home during COVID-19 lockdowns might increase strain on water and energy resources, which are mostly from non-renewable sources in several countries, including Kazakhstan; however, such potentially important effects have not yet been studied for the country. The present research aims to evaluate how the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns have affected the water and energy consumption in residential housings in cities of varying sizes in Kazakhstan, providing a novel understanding of the effect of pandemic lockdowns on household energy and water consumption. Energy and water consumption data of Almaty, Shymkent, and Atyrau have been first obtained from the local service companies, and then, the usage behavior was analyzed for the periods before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. After, statistical tests were conducted to check the hypotheses regarding the effect of COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns on the consumption of energy and water. The findings indicate that residential energy and water consumption increased during the lockdown periods in large and medium cities. Nevertheless, this growth is not highly significant compared to similar non-pandemic timeframes. This result could indicate a particular risk for sustainable resources consumption and put pressure on the supply companies. Moreover, in case of further lockdown measures, current building systems are at risk of increased pressure, and eventually, of failure. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Impact of COVID-19 Pandemics on Buildings’ Energy Consumptions and Indoor Environmental Quality: Current Issues and Future Needs)
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31 pages, 2980 KiB  
Article
Working from Home in Italy during COVID-19 Lockdown: A Survey to Assess the Indoor Environmental Quality and Productivity
by Francesco Salamone, Benedetta Barozzi, Alice Bellazzi, Lorenzo Belussi, Ludovico Danza, Anna Devitofrancesco, Matteo Ghellere, Italo Meroni, Fabio Scamoni and Chiara Scrosati
Buildings 2021, 11(12), 660; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings11120660 - 18 Dec 2021
Cited by 16 | Viewed by 4202
Abstract
Italians were the first European citizens to experience the lockdown due to Sars-Cov-2 in March 2020. Most employees were forced to work from home. People suddenly had to share common living spaces with family members for longer periods of time and convert home [...] Read more.
Italians were the first European citizens to experience the lockdown due to Sars-Cov-2 in March 2020. Most employees were forced to work from home. People suddenly had to share common living spaces with family members for longer periods of time and convert home spaces into workplaces. This inevitably had a subjective impact on the perception, satisfaction and preference of indoor environmental quality and work productivity. A web-based survey was designed and administered to Italian employees to determine how they perceived the indoor environmental quality of residential spaces when Working From Home (WFH) and to investigate the relationship between different aspects of users’ satisfaction. A total of 330 valid questionnaires were collected and analysed. The article reports the results of the analyses conducted using a descriptive approach and predictive models to quantify comfort in living spaces when WFH, focusing on respondents’ satisfaction. Most of them were satisfied with the indoor environmental conditions (89% as the sum of “very satisfied” and “satisfied” responses for thermal comfort, 74% for visual comfort, 68% for acoustic quality and 81% for indoor air quality), while the layout of the furniture negatively influenced the WFH experience: 45% of the participants expressed an unsatisfactory or neutral opinion. The results of the sentiment analysis confirmed this trend. Among the Indoor Environmental factors that affect productivity, visual comfort is the most relevant variable. As for the predictive approach using machine learning, the Support Vector Machine classifier performed best in predicting overall satisfaction. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Impact of COVID-19 Pandemics on Buildings’ Energy Consumptions and Indoor Environmental Quality: Current Issues and Future Needs)
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