Ventilation for Buildings
Research group: professor Andy Woods
The Problem
Ventilation is essential in buildings, but striking a balance between health, comfort and energy efficiency may be difficult.
Work Needed
We need to develop new strategies for the ventilation of a space, which help achieve thermal comfort and high indoor air quality while minimising the amount of energy required.
Our Work
We use a combination of small-scale laboratory experiments and full-scale building monitoring to model different ventilation scenarios.
Background
Buildings need ventilation to remove stale air and replace it with fresh air. The way we currently ventilate buildings is very energy intensive.
There are various factors that make ventilation important: for example, good ventilation reduces the propagation of airborne diseases, while poor ventilation might lead to high carbon dioxide levels, which impact people’s comfort and ability to concentrate.
The difficulty lies in the fact that different factors may sometimes sit in tension. Striking a balance between health, comfort, and energy efficiency is a complex challenge.
Our Work
Our research focuses on understanding and optimising different strategies for the ventilation of a space, with the ultimate goal of identifying general principles that apply across different building designs.
We use a combination of small-scale analogue laboratory experiments as well as full-scale monitoring of buildings to model real-world ventilation scenarios.
Propagation of a pulse of CO2 through the ventilated rooms and corridors of a ward in the newly built Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge (Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med, vol. 203, 2021)