HVAC and Healthy Buildings

Dear Colleagues,

Creating healthy indoor environments for building occupants and utilising cleaner energy resources are more important than ever. The current COVID-19 pandemic and the extreme weather events we are facing across the globe are timely reminders, calling for more resilient buildings with fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The importance of health and well-being for all and affordable and clean energy are highlighted in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system is a determiner in providing improved indoor air quality and reduced energy consumption. The design of a HVAC system is challenging, since its performance depends on many competing factors. To make the building disease-resilient, ventilation, filtration, and air cleaning are paramount in reducing airborne infectious aerosol exposure. The provision of higher rates of fresh airflow, cleaning return air, and better air distribution methods have been recommended for reducing indoor air pollutants. Some of these actions may result in increased energy consumption. Thus, the application of more sustainable energy sources for space heating, cooling and ventilation is important.

A current bibliographic analysis conducted based on the Web of Science citation database produced a co-occurrence analytical map of keywords (Figure 1) within the dataset (topic search, “HVAC” AND “Building Energy”). Over the last three years, the emerging clusters identified are in areas such as energy saving, occupant behaviour, algorithm, multi-objective optimization, control systems, model predictive control, deep learning, artificial intelligence, ANN, and the Internet of Things. This Special Issue aims to cover both developed and emerging areas of HVAC and building energy (Figure 1), supplementing the existing literature.

Figure 1. Co-occurrence analytical map of keywords within the dataset

Potential topics of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Affordable HVAC systems;
• Building codes and regulations for disease resilience and sustainability;
• Deep learning for indoor air quality control;
• Emerging air filtration and cleaning techniques;
• Integrated design process for low-carbon HVAC;
• Low-carbon HVAC systems;
• Low-carbon retrofit interventions;
• Model predictive control of HVAC system for various building typologies;
• Modelling, simulation and optimisation of disease-resilient HVAC systems;
• Occupant behaviour and interactions with HVAC systems;
• Passive and low-energy HVAC solutions;
• Retrofit HVAC systems for more disease resilience and better energy efficiency;
• Risk analysis and risk management of HVAC system impact on health;
• Solar cooling and heating systems;
• Zero-carbon HVAC systems.

Prof. Dr. Lu Aye
Dr. Amitha Jayalath
Dr. Philip Christopher
Dr. Paulo Vaz-Serra
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• post COVID-19
• space heating
• space cooling
• ventilation
• high performance building
• healthy building
• modelling
• simulation
• optimisation
• model predictive control
• solar cooling
• risk analysis
• risk management