Field studies suggest that the availability of adjustable thermostats, operable windows and other controls has a positive impact on comfort, the incidence of building related symptoms and productivity. This laboratory study was designed to further investigate how having or not having control over the thermal environment affects human responses to the indoor environment.The study was conducted in summer in a field laboratory that was kept at 28°C. A total of 23 subjects were exposed twice for about 2.5h. During the first session (A) subjects were able to fine-tune their local thermal environment at any given time with a personal desk fan with continuous, stepless adjustable control. During the second session (B) subjects still had the desk fans, but this time the fans were controlled from an adjacent room by the researchers who adjusted the individual air speed profiles so they were identical to those recorded during the first session. Thus, each subject was exposed to two customized conditions with identical exposure, only different from a psychological point of view.During the two sessions identical questionnaires and performance tests were used to evaluate subjects' comfort, SBS symptom incidence and performance. As expected, perceived control over the environment was significantly higher during session A, but there were no differences in perceived comfort and SBS symptom intensity. Both self-assessed and objectively measured performance was significantly better during session B. About two-thirds of the subjects indicated to prefer the situation as during the first session when they themselves controlled the air movement.@en

Purpose - To provide input data to design and energy performance calculations of buildings and ventilation, heating, cooling and lighting systems. Design/methodology/approach - European directive for energy performance of buildings was approved in the beginning of 2003. The transition period is 3-6 years depending on the article. European Standardisation Organisation (CEN) has drafted several standards to help the member countries implementing the directive. One of these is the "Criteria for the indoor environment including thermal, indoor air quality (ventilation) light and noise." The standard has been developed based on existing international standards and guidelines for the indoor environment taken into account the latest results from published research. Findings - The standard specifies design values of indoor environment, values to be used in energy calculations, and methods how to verify the specified indoor environment in the buildings. The paper describes some of the principles used in standards, and gives examples presented in the standard. The standard covers all building types but the paper is focuses on the non-residential buildings, numeric examples are given only for offices. Research limitations/implications - The draft standard is under international review process during writing this paper, and subject to changes. The standard give default criteria for the indoor environmental parameters, which can be used if no national requirements are available. Originality/value - This paper describes the indoor environmental parameters, which are important for people's health, comfort and energy consumption of buildings. This will help users to select more uniform input data for energy calculations.@en

A new design method is proposed to calculate outdoor air ventilation rates to control respiratory infection risk in indoor spaces. We propose to use this method in future ventilation standards to complement existing ventilation criteria based on the perceived air quality and pollutant removal. The proposed method makes it possible to calculate the required ventilation rate at a given probability of infection and quanta emission rate. Present work used quanta emission rates for SARS-CoV-2 and consequently the method can be applied for other respiratory viruses with available quanta data. The method was applied to case studies representing typical rooms in public buildings. To reduce the probability of infection, the total airflow rate per infectious person revealed to be the most important parameter to reduce the infection risk. Category I ventilation rate prescribed in the EN 16798-1 standard satisfied many but not all type of spaces examined. The required ventilation rates started from about 80 L/s per room. Large variations between the results for the selected case studies made it impossible to provide a simple rule for estimating the required ventilation rates. Consequently, we conclude that to design rooms with a low infection risk the newly developed ventilation design method must be used.

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