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Buildings & Construction

Indoor air quality

News and Updates

Projects and Programs

CO2 Estimate

Ventilation Performance for Novel Sustainability and Resilience Challenges

Ongoing
Objective: To develop tools, metrics, and data to enable sustainable, resilient, high-performance building and ventilation system design and operation in response to current and future challenges driven by climate change, airborne disease transmission, and other developing hazards. Also, to develop
The Metrics & Tools project assesses whole building sustainability for buildings located in 228 U.S. cities.

Metrics and Tools for Sustainable Buildings

Ongoing
Objective: Develop, integrate, apply, and deploy measurement science assessing the sustainability performance of energy technologies and systems in an integrated building design and operation context, and provide the necessary information to stakeholders to make more sustainable choices in
Drawing of NIST Net-Zero Energy Residential Test Facility.

Measuring the Performance of Net-Zero Energy Homes

Completed
Objective: Develop the measurement science necessary to evaluate various technological approaches to achieve net-zero energy residential buildings, including innovative monitoring techniques, methods of test, performance metrics and high quality experimental data for the validation and improvement
L researcher Steven Emmerich adjusts a multi-gas analyzer that will measure carbon monoxide, oxygen, carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons concentrations produced by such a generator located, against safety advice, in a garage.

Ventilation and Indoor Air Quality in Low-Energy Buildings

Ongoing
Objective: To develop tools to define and verify high-performance indoor air quality in low-energy buildings and data needed to improve the effectiveness of high-performance building standards and programs. What is the new technical idea? The ASHRAE Position Document on Indoor Air Quality (ASHRAE

Publications

Chemical characteristics of indoor aerosol particles and surface films

Author(s)
Rachel O'Brien, Cate Shirilla, Amy Hrdina, Emily Legaard, Kathryn Mayer, Marina Vance, Dustin Poppendieck, Delphine Farmer
Indoor surfaces and the films on them play important roles in indoor air quality due to the high surface area to volume ratios in our homes. The chemical

Working from Home and the Impacts on Residential Buildings

Author(s)
William M. Healy, Kristen Cetin, Richard Karg, Chandra Sekhar, Li Song, Jerzy Sowa, Iain Walker, Pawel Wargocki
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a rapid and dramatic shift in the number of people working from home. For ASHRAE, the shift to more work from home has an

Software

CONTAM

CONTAM is a multizone indoor air quality and ventilation analysis computer program designed to help you determine: (a) airflows: infiltration, exfiltration, and
Figure of FaTIMA model

FaTIMA

The web-based tool Fate and Transport of Indoor Microbiological Aerosols (FaTIMA) allows for the determination of the indoor fate of microbiological aerosols

Tools and Instruments

IAQ test house

Indoor Air Quality Test House

In order to enable studies of a range of indoor air quality and ventilation issues, EL maintains a highly instrumented three-bedroom test house. Previous