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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

Illustrated cutaway showing the inside of the Net Zero Energy House

Measurement Science for Building Systems

Ongoing
Objective: To develop and deploy advances in measurement science to enable the design and operation of high-performance building systems while maintaining healthier indoor environments. What is the problem? Buildings account for 40 % of the primary energy consumption, 74 % of the electricity
Measurement of the air velocity profile exiting a section of the rooftop air-conditioning unit's heat exchanger

Space-Conditioning Options for High-Performance Buildings

Ongoing
Objective Develop and deploy the measurement science to support the implementation of cost-effective space-conditioning options for high-performance buildings. Technical Idea The unique aspects of high-efficiency homes require new solutions for space-conditioning equipment. Because of tighter

Air Distribution Impacts in Net-Zero Energy Homes

Ongoing
Objective To acquire high-quality data from well-controlled field configurations that inform residential building designers and equipment standards organizations about space conditioning and ventilation system performance characteristics, especially the air distribution system(s), when applied in
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

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