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Buildings & Construction

Indoor air quality

News and Updates

A newly built two-story home with an attached garage has solar panels on the roof.

A House Ahead of Its Time

A decade in, NIST’s superefficient house continues to generate results and advance building science.

Projects and Programs

The Metrics & Tools project assesses whole building sustainability for buildings located in 228 U.S. cities.

Metrics and Tools for Sustainable Buildings

Ongoing
Objective To develop and deploy transparent, open source standards-based data and tools that quantify the life-cycle cost and sustainability performance of building technologies and systems by 2027 through parallel activities focused on developing, releasing, and expanding capabilities and adoption
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
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. Also, to develop a methodology to evaluate potential changes to ventilation and IAQ standards so their
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 quantify and verify high-performance IAQ in buildings, provide input data to improve usability of the tools including building models, develop methods needed to support and verify the applicability of these tools to improving the effectiveness of high-performance

Publications

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