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Healthy Buildings: Indoor Environmental Quality Control and Sustainability
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Healthy Buildings: Indoor Environmental Quality Control and Sustainability

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 (30 November 2022) | Viewed by 4746

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Margarita Niki Assimakopoulos

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Physics, University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Interests: building physics; indoor air quality; energy; materials
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Buildings majorly impact health and well-being since people spend most of their time indoors. Therefore, energy-efficient building construction has evolved into healthy building construction, which considers physical and psychological health and social well-being factors that influence occupants’ behaviour and productivity.

Healthy infrastructure is an emerging field of research focusing on topics related to indoor environmental quality control and sustainability, including the monitoring and assessment of indoor air quality, the use of innovative building, circular materials and renovation and construction processes concerning indoor environmental quality. Thus, research on design guidelines and modelling or simulation methods, thermal and visual comfort, sustainability-centred design, incorporation of recycled materials, performance assessment of materials in regard to air quality and other related fields is urgently needed.

This Special Issue will provide a platform for the discussion and exchange of knowledge of methods, techniques, ideas and materials for the establishment of healthy and sustainable buildings. Papers may cover any aspects of science and engineering technology and their applications.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Indoor air quality control and COVID-19 transmission.
  • Indoor and outdoor air monitoring (smart networks and smart homes).
  • Statistical analysis techniques for indoor air quality (IAQ) big data.
  • Effect of personal exposure on occupants’ health and productivity.
  • Thermal, visual and acoustic comfort in NZEB buildings.
  • Design, installation and monitoring of state-of-the-art ventilation systems.
  • Indoor air quality in new built/ retrofitted constructions.
  • Influence of European energy crisis on the building sector.
  • Green transition in the context of the building environment.
  • Innovative materials used in the depollution of the indoor environment.
  • Indoor environmental quality in connection to energy efficiency, energy poverty and health.
  • Healthy buildings effect on people’s behaviour and productivity.

Dr. Margarita Niki Assimakopoulos
Guest Editor

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

  • circular building materials
  • design
  • simulations and modelling of sustainable buildings
  • indoor air quality
  • built environment
  • circular renovation process
  • sustainability in buildings
  • thermal and visual comfort

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

26 pages, 11441 KiB  
Article
Optimizing the Air Conditioning Layouts of an Indoor Built Environment: Towards the Energy and Environmental Benefits of a Clean Room
by Muhammad Rizwan, Shehbaz Ahmad, Syed Nasir Shah, Muzaffar Ali, Mansoor Ul Hassan Shah, Muhammad Zaman, Humbul Suleman, Muddasar Habib, Rasikh Tariq and Jaroslaw Krzywanski
Buildings 2022, 12(12), 2158; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12122158 - 7 Dec 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1922
Abstract
Reducing energy consumption in buildings has received intensified research impetus since the introduction of the decarbonization goals set in the Paris agreement. Many domestic and specialized applications require clean rooms (indoor built environments) for safe and clean operation. Energy efficiency in clean room [...] Read more.
Reducing energy consumption in buildings has received intensified research impetus since the introduction of the decarbonization goals set in the Paris agreement. Many domestic and specialized applications require clean rooms (indoor built environments) for safe and clean operation. Energy efficiency in clean room spaces depends on maintaining livable or required conditions such as temperature, humidity, and particle concentration with minimal use of energy and new carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. In the literature, parameters such as temperature, relative humidity, particle concentrations, and CO2 emissions are not able to be properly controlled in clean room systems. The designed system in the literature involves high energy consumption and high economic costs. All these factors add novelty to this research, which was a significant research gap in previous studies. This clean room is directly linked to environmental parameters such as ambient temperature, relative humidity, etc. The clean room is also related directly to the building and infrastructure in such a way that there are certain regulatory requirements for designing a clean room. For designing and constructing the controlled environment in a clean room, the English (EN) documents, ISO 9000, and various other standards allow for clean rooms for different types of products. In this research, the designed control configurations properly control the system. Additionally, this system is energy efficient, with positive environmental aspects regarding CO2 emissions. Three control configurations were designed in this research, option A, option B, and option C, and three parameters are controlled in the study. These parameters are room temperature, relative humidity, and CO2 emissions (outside the room). CO2 emissions are controlled outside the room (in the environment). In the last research phase, a comparative analysis of these three control configurations was performed to find an energy-efficient system with fewer CO2 emissions. Control configuration B (option B) provides reliable results regarding an energy-efficient system and fewer CO2 emissions emitted to the environment. In this study, an optimized configuration for the air conditioning system was developed for a clean room (volume 185.6 m3) with a required temperature of 23 °C, relative humidity of 40%, and a particle size of less than 0.3 μm. Three different design configurations were analyzed using TRNSYS simulation software. The minimization of energy use and CO2 emissions were the objective functions. Energy loads were calculated for each of the configurations by varying the fixed air change per hour and the minimum outdoor air flow rate. The results of a whole year simulation run for control configurations A, B, and show that, on the one hand, the ambient weather conditions of temperature and relative humidity (RH) is varied throughout year and, on the other hand, the clean room temperature was maintain at exactly 23 °C, which is the required set point temperature, for all the three configurations (A, B, and C). Furthermore, the clean room relative humidity was maintained at 36% for configuration A, below the 40% which was the set point for clean room relative humidity, and at 40% for configurations B and C. Configuration B exhibited the minimum energy use (7300 kWh), at a fixed air change per hour value of 20 and a minimum outdoor air flow rate of 150 L/s, with the least amount of CO2 emissions, offering an overall 25% improvement over configurations A and C. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Healthy Buildings: Indoor Environmental Quality Control and Sustainability)
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23 pages, 14533 KiB  
Article
Application of Low-Cost Sensors for Accurate Ambient Temperature Monitoring
by Behnam Mobaraki, Seyedmilad Komarizadehasl, Francisco Javier Castilla Pascual and José Antonio Lozano-Galant
Buildings 2022, 12(9), 1411; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12091411 - 8 Sep 2022
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 2264
Abstract
In structures with reduced monitoring budgets, the high cost of commercial metering devices is always an obstacle for monitoring structural health. This might be an issue when temperatures must be measured for both structural and environmental reasons. To fill this gap, in this [...] Read more.
In structures with reduced monitoring budgets, the high cost of commercial metering devices is always an obstacle for monitoring structural health. This might be an issue when temperatures must be measured for both structural and environmental reasons. To fill this gap, in this paper, a novel monitoring system is proposed for the accurate measurement of indoor temperature in buildings. This protocol is characterized by its generality, as it can be easily adapted to measure any structural or environmental parameters on site. The proposed monitoring system uses from one to eight low-cost sensors to obtain multiple measurements of the ambient temperatures. The accuracy ranges of the developed monitoring systems with different numbers of sensors are statistically analysed. The results indicate that the discrepancy of the measurements decreases with the increase in the number of sensors, as the maximum standard deviation of 10 sensors (0.42) decreases to 0.32 and 0.27 for clusters of 20 and 30 sensors, respectively. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Healthy Buildings: Indoor Environmental Quality Control and Sustainability)
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