People spend most of their time indoors, especially in homes. The main purpose of buildings should be to not only protect people from the inhospitable outdoor environment and create a thermally comfortable environment, but also to provide a healthy and safe indoor environment for all occupants. Indoor environments contain pollutants from outdoor and indoor sources. Some of the indoor pollutants produce odor or cause irritation, while some pose chronic and/or acute health effects on occupants via inhalation, dermal or other pathways.
Ventilation is one of the most important means to remove or dilute indoor pollutants and maintain a habitable space for human beings. The effect of ventilation on health is complex: ventilation rates affect health indirectly by changing indoor air concentrations of contaminants or moisture that affect health. Available epidemiological data show that high ventilation rates may reduce bad health outcomes. But no clear causality has been established and no universally applicable ventilation-health relationship can be established. The impact of the wide range of ventilation rates reported in previous studies that produced different outcomes is probably due to complex relationships among ventilation rates, contaminant levels and human health. Hence, the relationship between ventilation and health risks requires further scrutiny.
In addition, ventilation is a major determinant of energy use, besides of public health. With increase of urbanization, the energy consumption for heating and air-conditioning systems has shown an increasing trend. Higher ventilation rates, means higher consumption of energy (unless heat recovery systems are used). Providing sufficient ventilation rate to keep occupants healthy at low energy consumption by applying advanced technologies, is the current focus and the future trend.
With this Research Topic, we aim to update the research ventilation community on current development in ventilation with regards to energy use, health effects and technological solutions; to get a consensus among researchers, practitioners, and policy makers on how to treat ventilation in different climate zones.
This Research Topic accepts original research articles and review papers on themes including, but not limited to:
• Ventilation in homes and health
• Ventilation in offices, schools, day cares and health
• How to measure ventilation in different buildings (e.g. homes, offices, schools, shops, etc.)
• What measures of ventilation (e.g. ventilation per hour; ventilation per person; CO2 average; CO2 maximum) in buildings should be used
• What technical solutions for ventilation are used today
• What new solutions could be used in the near future
Keywords: Ventilation, Human health, Built environment, Air flow, CO2, Indoor air quality, Technical solution, Energy use
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
