Indoor air quality has been an important part of building design and maintenance for well over 100 years. Initially the drive for indoor air quality was for people to be able to work in “healthy” buildings to prevent the spread of disease. With the invention of air conditioning this arguably led to the boom in Sick Building Syndrome in the 80s. And then towards the end of the 20th century, the environmental impact of air ventilation and conditioning became the priority with ever greener and sustainable energy initiatives becoming the focal point of how buildings supplied conditioned air. In the wake of Covid-19, it seems that disease control element is now taking the driving seat once more.

The world is on a mission to decarbonise. In 2019 the UK Government was the world’s first major economy to cast a its pledge to end its contribution to climate change by 2050 into law. While much progress has been made on decarbonising the UK’s electricity sector in recent years, the built environment is and remains a major challenge. A core vector for the decarbonisation of heat will be electrification, bringing with it challenges around the balancing of supply and demand that need to be addressed by increasing amounts of energy storage. Thermal storage has been a segment of the HVAC market that has seen little innovation over the decades. This presentation will discuss how the use of phase-change material based heat batteries will contribute to meeting the decarbonisation challenge in the built environment by providing the necessary flexibility in a future energy system. It will detail the functional principles of heat batteries, their theoretical applications as well as real world case-studies for their use in today’s projects.

HVAC system designers today have available computer programs which allow accurate determination of heating and cooling loads for specific building locations. In addition, there are programs which enable optimum choices for many system components (cooling coils, blowers, ductwork, etc.). There are, however, no generally accepted programs with which to determine the particulate matter indoor concentration and the air quality which will be obtained from given filter designs at specified locations. This is partially due to the complex nature of airborne particulate contamination and filtration processes, which have hindered the development of designer tools for filter systems. Air filters are often chosen on the basis of what worked somewhere. However, the design of HVAC air filter systems for particulate matter control is not entirely unquantifiable. Data are available on the nature and concentration of air contaminants in many locations world-wide, and on acceptable levels to be maintained indoors. Internationally accepted filter test standards exist which allow approximate calculation of the effect of filters on contaminant levels, and, in some cases, the expected energy consumption and cost impacts of filter systems. The proposed lecture is intended to illustrate what tools are now available to quantify the particulate matter and the design of filtration systems. Examples of performance calculations using existing data sources will be presented.

Join us for the ASHRAE DL presentation. Today an acceptable indoor air quality is mainly defined by specifying the required level of ventilation in air changes per hour or the outside air supply rate. The increasing societal need for energy efficiency will often result in very tight buildings. This means that the amount of outside air supplied by infiltration is not enough to provide the required ventilation. In some standards, the required ventilation is based on adapted people (occupants) while other standards refer to un-adapted persons, who have just entered a room. Which approach is correct? Or should it depend on the type of space or occupancy? The present talk provides an overview and discusses the criteria used for specifying required ventilation rates and suggests ways of meeting the criteria in a more energy-efficient way by means of improved ventilation effectiveness, use of air cleaning, and by means of demand-controlled ventilation.

Join us for the ASHRAE DL program on Net zero energy buildings. As building regulations around the world continue to impose energy targets in order to reduce carbon emissions and to conserve fossil fuels, designers and contractors must provide buildings which can perform successfully with less energy aiming for Net Zero. The EU requires all buildings to be Net Zero by 2019, excluding plug and process loads, whilst the ASHRAE Board have proposed Net Zero INCUDING plug and process loads by 2030. This presentation will provide attendees with an overview of the issues involved and the potential design solutions to achieve Net Zero in a cost effective, practical manner using feedback from exemplar solutions. New Zero strategies are proposed along with design tools, practical tips, and advice on suitable support information and case study examples.