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Housing quality and affordability are well established as social determinants of health through direct and indirect mechanisms. Respiratory illnesses related to housing are nearly all the result of housing disrepair that allows intrusion into the home of environmental agents that are directly or indirectly associated with disease. Structural deficiencies such as leaks, cracks in the foundation or holes in the home's exterior can facilitate the presence of mould, which is causally linked to the development of asthma and is associated with exacerbation of asthma symptoms in children and adults. Indoor cleanliness can also contribute to the presence of mice and cockroaches. Proper ventilation can improve air quality, reducing exposure to PM, VOCs and infectious respiratory agents. Disparities in exposure to the housing conditions associated with respiratory disease are readily apparent across socioeconomic lines. Low-income families are less likely to be able to afford the costs of maintaining a home, which prevents them from making repairs that could improve respiratory health.Copyright © ERS 2023.
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The purpose of research was to study practices, barriers, and solutions of Phetchabun health massage establishments under COVID-19 situation. Non-participant observation, informal interview, in-depth interview, and participation observation were carried out respectively. Purposive sampling was used with 15 health consumer protection officers in charge;11 district level, 2 provincial level, 2 regional level as well as each representative of 11 districts. Results after implementation of "Preparation Guidelines for Health Spa, Health Massage, and Beauty Massage to Promote Health Tourism During COVID-19 Pandemic" were categorized into two sections. Firstly, the practices, barriers, and solutions of government officer performances included preparation for reopening, monitoring of the provider practices, and performance report. Secondly, the provider operations consisted of doing "Self-Assessment of Health Establishment", logging-in webpage before reopening, and practices for clients included screening and report of patients under investigation, establishment monitor, service, and establishment cleaning. In summary, the preparation guidelines were purposed to reopen their business with numerous contents and messages written by official language, it caused establishment providers and practitioners difficultly understood when applying. LINE Application and making calls were easy and accessible methods for their communication to reach current data and to ensure exact information. Various encouragements and having compliments were also considerable to form trust and confidence among them, they also raised their proud.Copyright © 2023, World Informations Syndicate. All rights reserved.
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The title of the ConferenceXXII Conference of PhD Students and Young Scientists "Interdisciplinary topics in mining and geology”The location and the date of the conferencevirtual event – online conference, June 29th to July 1st, 2022 in Wrocław, PolandXXIInd Conference of PhD Students and Young Scientists "Interdisciplinary topics in mining and geology” continues a series of events that started in 2000 at Wrocław University of Science and Technology. Scientific programme of the Conference focuses on four thematic panels:1. Mining Engineering: sustainable development, digitalisation in mining, problems of securing, protecting and using remnants of old mining works, underground mining, opencast mining, mineral processing, waste management, mining machinery, mine transport, economics in mining, mining aeronautics, ventilation and air conditioning in mines,2. Earth and Space Sciences: geology, hydrogeology, environmental protection, extraterrestrial resources, groundwater and medicinal waters, engineering and environmental protection, geotourism,3. Geoengineering: environmental protection, applied geotechnics, rock and soil mechanics, geohazards,4. Geoinformation: mining geodesy, GIS, photogrammetry and remote sensing, geodata modeling and analysis.The XXII Conference of PhD Students and Young Scientists was held as a virtual event, that is as a virtual, online conference in real-time. The reason why the Organizing Committee decided to change the traditional formula of the event to online formula was related to the concern for the health of the participants due to the COVID-19 epidemic.The XXII Conference of PhD Students and Young Scientists took place from June 29th to July 1st, 2022 in Wroclaw, Poland. That is the organizers worked and managed the event from the Wrocław University of Science and Technology Geocentre building. Because the conference focused on four thematic panels, four different special opening lectures were delivered by wellknown scientists- Professor Jan Zalasiewicz (University of Leicester, England)- Associate Professor Artur Krawczyk (AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland)- Professor Biljana Kovacević-Zelić (University of Zagreb, Croatia)- Assistant Professor Eduard Kan (Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanizations Engineers, Uzbekistan).The Conference was divided into 8 oral sessions (with 33 presentations) and 1 poster session (with 33 posters). The amount of time provided to one presentation was 15 minutes, after presentation there was 5 minutes available for discussion. The poster session was available throughout the event, and the posters were available for online viewing on the Conference's website with the possibility of make discussion and ask questions in real time via zoom meeting application as well. Every day of the Conference one "virtual coffee break” was devoted for discussion between participants and question and answer session for the Organizers.There were 96 registered participants from 13 countries. The online XXII Conference of PhD Students and Young Scientists was conducted using the Zoom meeting platform with commemorative screen shots taken. By tradition two competitions, for the best oral presentation and for the best poster were held. The award for the best oral presentation was given ex aequo to Julia Tiganj (TH Georg Agricola University of Applied Sciences, Germany) for the presentation entitled Post-mining goes international: hurdles to climate neutrality using the example of China and Oksana Khomiak, Jörg Benndorf (TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany) for the presentation entitled Spectral analysis of ore hyperspectral images at different stages of the mining value chain, whereas the best poster was awarded to Adam Wróblewski, Jacek Wodecki, Paweł Trybała, Radosław Zimroz (Wrocław University of Science and technology, Poland) for the poster entitled Large underground structures geometry evaluation based on point cloud data analysis.List of Scientific Committee, Organizing Committee, Editorial Team are available i this pdf.
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Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-COV-2) is spreading rapidly around the world and has become a global pandemic. Meteorological factors have been recognized as one of the critical factors that influence the epidemiology and transmission of infectious diseases. In this context, the World Meteorological Organization and scholars at home and abroad have paid extensive attention to the relationships of environment and meteorology with COVID-19. This paper systematically collected and sorted out relevant domestic and foreign studies, and reviewed the latest research progress on the impact of environmental and meteorological factors on COVID-19, classifying them into typical meteorological factors (such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed), local environmental factors (such as indoor enclosed environment, ventilation, disinfection, and air conditioning), and air pollution. Current research evidence suggests that typical meteorological factors, local environmental factors, and air pollutants are closely related to the transmission of COVID-19. However, the results of different studies are still divergent due to uncertainty about the influencing mechanism, and differences in research areas and methods. This review elucidated the importance of environmental and meteorological factors to the spread of COVID-19, and provided useful implications for the control of further large-scale transmission of COVID-19 and the development of prevention and control strategies under different environmental and meteorological conditions.Copyright © 2022, Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention. All rights reserved.
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The impact of the COVID pandemic has resulted in many people cultivating a remote working culture and increasing building energy use. A reduction in the energy use of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is necessary for decreasing the energy use in buildings. The refrigerant charge of a heat pump greatly affects its energy use. However, refrigerant leakage causes a significant increase in the energy use of HVAC systems. The development of refrigerant charge fault detection models is, therefore, important to prevent unwarranted energy consumption and CO2 emissions in heat pumps. This paper examines refrigerant charge faults and their effect on a variable speed heat pump and the most accurate method between a multiple linear regression and multilayer perceptron model to use in detecting the refrigerant charge fault using the discharge temperature of the compressor, outdoor entering water temperature and compressor speed as inputs, and refrigerant charge as the output. The COP of the heat pump decreased when it was not operating at the optimum refrigerant charge, while an increase in compressor speed compensated for the degradation in the capacity during refrigerant leakage. Furthermore, the multilayer perception was found to have a higher prediction accuracy of the refrigerant charge fault with a mean square error of ± 3.7%, while the multiple linear regression model had a mean square error of ± 4.5%. The study also found that the multilayer perception model requires 7 neurons in the hidden layer to make viable predictions on any subsequent test sets fed into it under similar experimental conditions and parameters of the heat pump used in this study.
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Air movement dynamics within three student dormitories were studied with simulated carbon dioxide (CO2) pulse injections to understand SARS-CoV-2 transmission risk. CO2 decay rate, proportion of shared air, and transport time were calculated from dynamic CO2 measurement data within simulated source and adjacent receptor rooms. Applying a Wells-Riley infection risk analysis with these results, the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection in adjacent rooms ranged from 1% to 58% assuming an average emission rate of 5 quanta per hour and exposure duration of 3.5 days. Door opening status was very influential in resulting risk and vertical transport from source to above rooms was observed in all dormitories. © 2022 17th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate, INDOOR AIR 2022. All rights reserved.
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Under the influence of COVID-19, it is recommended to ventilate to reduce the risk of infection in the room. In an air-conditioned room, window open can increased the ventilation rate that caused by indoor and outdoor temperature difference. However, there is a concern that opening window in the air-conditioned room will increase the heating and cooling load due to air leakage. In addition, it is difficult to maintain the appropriate ventilation rate because the outdoor air temperature changes time to time. To solve this problem, we have developed an automatic window opening system to control the natural ventilation rate. In this study, actual measurements were conducted to understand the operating performance of the system, and its effect on the indoor thermal environment. As a result, it was confirmed that the ventilation rate could be controlled by this system. © 2022 17th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate, INDOOR AIR 2022. All rights reserved.
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Acute hepatitis of unknown origin in children has been recently described in the literature, and a case definition has also been proposed for this condition. The exact etiology is unknown and exclusion of infectious, metabolic, autoimmune and toxin mediated injuries is essential. Management for this condition is supportive, but some may require liver transplantation. Infection prevention and control practices are important as the etiology remains unidentified.Copyright © 2023, Indian Academy of Pediatrics.
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From the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, there have been many reports on cluster infections in clubs and bars. Meanwhile, there is no report on the indoor air environment in those places and it will limit measures for infection control. This study aims to understand the indoor air and ventilation environment and to propose practical and appropriate improvement measures for related industries. In addition to measuring CO2 concentration in clubs and bars in Tokyo, we have surveyed the voluntary measures taken against COVID-19, outlines of building and ventilation/air conditioning equipment, ventilation regime, and so on. © 2023 Architectural Institute of Japan. All rights reserved.
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Objectives: Upper gastrointestinal endoscopies are aerosol-generating procedures, increasing the risk of spreading airborne pathogens. We aim to quantify the mitigation of airborne particles via improved ventilation, specifically laminar flow theatres and portable high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, during and after upper gastrointestinal endoscopies. Methods: This observational study included patients undergoing routine upper gastrointestinal endoscopy in a standard endoscopy room with 15-17 air changes per hour, a standard endoscopy room with a portable HEPA filtration unit, and a laminar flow theatre with 300 air changes per hour. A particle counter (diameter range 0.3 µm-25 µm) took measurements 10 cm from the mouth. Three analyses were performed: whole procedure particle counts, event-based counts, and air clearance estimation using post-procedure counts. Results: Compared to a standard endoscopy room, for whole procedures we observe a 28.5x reduction in particle counts in laminar flow (p < 0.001) but no significant effect of HEPA filtration (p = 0.50). For event analysis, we observe for lateral flow theatres reduction in particles >5 µm for oral extubation (12.2x, p < 0.01), reduction in particles <5 µm for coughing/gagging (6.9x, p < 0.05), and reduction for all sizes in anesthetic throat spray (8.4x, p < 0.01) but no significant effect of HEPA filtration. However, we find that in the fallow period between procedures HEPA filtration reduces particle clearance times by 40%. Conclusions: Laminar flow theatres are highly effective at dispersing aerosols immediately after production and should be considered for high-risk cases where patients are actively infectious or the supply of personal protective equipment is limited. Portable HEPA filers can safely reduce the fallow time between procedures by 40%.
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School classrooms are often reported as having insufficient ventilation with elevated indoor CO2 concentrations. This paper reports on pre-pandemic field measurements of CO2 concentration levels conducted for an academic year in 10 classrooms from four primary and a secondary school in Victoria, Australia. Measured CO2 concentrations across the 10 classrooms which were operated with a mix of intermittent natural ventilation and air-conditioning for cooling or heating, on average ranged between 657 ppm and 2235 ppm during school hours with median over 1000 ppm in 70% of classrooms. All 10 classrooms in the study exceeded the Australian recommended limit of 850 ppm. Using average peak CO2 concentrations from year-long measurements, estimated ventilation rate (VR) of 4.08 Ls-1 per person show under-performing classrooms where 60% had VRs 35–40% lower than the 10-12 Ls−1 per person Australian recommendation. Estimated VR range of 1.24–2.07 Ls-1 per person using peak maximum CO2 levels were 19–30% lower than ASHRAE recommendation of 6.7 Ls-1 per person. These VRs translate to a range of air change rates on average between 0.52 and 0.88 h−1 ± 0.26–0.59, well below the 6.0 h−1 recommendation for good indoor ventilation by the World Health Organisation in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. Characterisation of ventilation and indoor air quality in current Australian classroom stock is critical for the improvement of classroom design, induction on room operating practices, understanding of the school community on the relevance of building ventilation on school performance and health, and development of appropriate ventilation and indoor air quality guidelines for schools. © 2023 The Authors
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Office-based environmental control systems are centralized and designed to control entire spaces, ignoring use dynamics and requirements, and despite being regulated by standardized comfort models, they fail to satisfy real occupants, mainly due to their varied individual characteristics. This research is field-based with a quantitative approach and correlational design. Its objective is to empirically demonstrate that open-plan design, where different users share the same space and generalized environmental conditions, lacks a holistic view of IEQ criteria and the integration of other factors that affect health and well-being. Four buildings are chosen in different Chilean cities, measuring temperatures and CO2 levels at different desks, and applying a survey, which was designed as part of the research to analyze the estimation of relationships between variables and to reveal the factors that cause differences among occupants. The results show that people's satisfaction is multivariable and depends on other factors that positively or negatively stimulate their sensations and perceptions, such as, for example, the option to personally control their environmental conditions. Likewise, it is evident that to achieve comfort, health is being affected while in the building.
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This study aims to propose building envelope retrofit packages for existing naturally ventilated school buildings in the hot–humid climatic region of Chennai, India. Indoor thermal parameters were collected through field studies from nine sample classrooms of a selected school building in May 2019, between 9.00 am and 4.00 pm. The thermal performance assessment of the existing building was performed by examining the discomfort hours using the CBE thermal comfort tool. Envelope retrofit strategies gathered from the literature and building standards were applied and studied through simulation. The findings reveal the enormous potential to increase the thermal comfort of existing school buildings through envelope retrofit measures. The results demonstrate that the whole-building temperature can be reduced up to 3.2 °C in summer and up to 3.4 °C in winter. Implementing retrofit measures to the building envelopes of existing buildings will help school owners to increase the comfortable hours of whole buildings by up to 17%. In comparison, annual energy savings of up to 13% for the whole building can be made by enhancing the thermal performance of the building envelope. The findings will also help architects to optimise thermal performance and energy usage with minimal interventions.
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Vocational education plays a strategic role in the creation of a skilled workforce who is ready to enter the world of work. In order to achieve the standard competency level, the proportion of practice is required to be 60% and large financing is required. During the Covid-19 pandemic there were many changes in the world of education, PBM had to be done online or online, children's education costs were not fulfilled due to layoffs, the economy slumped and had an impact on entrepreneurship and the influence of student personal costs. The cost of education has changed a lot. A study of changes in financing is needed for planning learning in covid conditions and demands for changes in learning patterns in the 4.0 era. The design used in this research is an explanatory mixed method research, quantitative data is taken together with qualitative data collection. The independent variable is the influence of the pandemic, the dependent variable is the cost of education (education budget and student personal costs). Online survey using googleform. The sample of level II and III students who have been exposed to face-to-face and online learning is 143 students. The education budget & costs are presented with the percentage of reduction and increase. Individual operational costs before and during the pandemic were used the Mann Whitney test at 95% confidence level. The recurrent cost budget that is used to finance the operational activities of PBM for D3 Nutrition Study Program for one budget year, with the predicate BLU should have financial management flexibility, so that student advice to provide tuition fee relief, complete facilities (campus wifi, practical equipment, air conditioning class), providing adequate quotas and spending for practical purposes as well as sufficient costs for student activities can be facilitated. All budget items decreased during the epidemic, except for the cost of providing goods and services for competency and IT compliance. The results of the survey on individual personal costs showed that the significance of all items in question, parents' income, living costs and transport costs decreased before and during the pandemic, while Quota and refreshing costs / personal needs increased on average. A deeper study is needed on the education budget and changes in individual operational costs during the Covid-19 pandemic and facing the challenges ahead in the 4.0 era.Copyright © 2020 Ubiquity Press. All rights reserved.
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The Air borne transmission is a very big concern for highly infectious diseases like Covid-19 and other airborne diseases. A micro droplet and aerosol can be carried out in the air and can remain flowing in air over a distance in a confined space, leading to affecting high number of people getting prone to infection and it is very dangerous in enclosed spaces or shared spaces. Public places, shared facilities are the areas, where infectious aerosol can be present in the air for a long duration. Ventilation of closed spaces, shared spaces is the need of hour to have analysed and deep study in context of infectious airborne diseases. Introduction of fresh air into the enclosed environment at regular interval of times may lead to fast dilution of air present in the enclosed space. The prominent building codes and HVAC guidelines allows as to calculate ACPH (Air changes per hour) in an enclosed space as per the occupancy and flow rate. The age of air is the criteria to define the amount of air residing in the enclosed space when it enters the space till its exhaust from that space. The more the age of air in the particular area the more can be the infection probability among the occupants. It is predominant to study the airflow pattern caused due to ventilation which can be collaborated with age of air to know about the infection probability. Typically, a classroom geometry is assumed with inlet outlet boundary conditions where exhaust fan is playing a major role of displacement ventilation. Study of air recirculation zones and dead zones is the point of interest of this study. Computational fluid dynamics is the most powerful tool in the present era to study the air flow pattern in enclosed and shared spaces.Copyright © 2022, Anka Publishers. All rights reserved.
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Given the current coronavirus (COVID-19) situation around the world, we may have to face a long-term battle with coronavirus. It is necessary to prepare and stay resilient with some other techniques to improve air quality in buildings, especially in clinics and hospitals. In this paper, we have developed Ultraviolet-C (UVC) light-emitting diode (LED) modules which can be implemented in air ducts in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system for airborne disinfection. An LED module is designed with LED panels as the basic unit so that it is easy to scale up to accommodate for air ducts with different sizes. Both experiments and simulations are carried out to study its disinfection performance. The results show that more than 76% and 85% of the pathogen can be inactivated within 60 and 90 min, respectively, in a meeting room with a volume of 107 m3 by using one LED module. Simulations for two LED modules show that the disinfection efficacy is more than two times compared to that of one LED module. In addition to the pathogen used in the experiments, the disinfection performance of the LED module for inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 virus based on the literature is investigated numerically. It shows that more than 99.70% of pathogens receive UV dose larger than 4.47 J/m2, leading to an almost 89.10% disinfection rate for SARS-CoV-2 virus within one hour using the two LED modules in the same meeting room. © 2023 Author(s).
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Airborne transmission via aerosol particles without close human contact is a possible source of infection with airborne viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 or influenza. Reducing this indirect infection risk, which is mostly present indoors, requires wearing adequate respiratory masks, the inactivation of the viruses with radiation or electric charges, filtering of the room air, or supplying ambient air by means of ventilation systems or open windows. For rooms without heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, mobile air cleaners are a possibility for filtering out aerosol particles and therefore lowering the probability of indirect infections. The main questions are as follows: (1) How effectively do mobile air cleaners filter the air in a room? (2) What are the parameters that influence this efficiency? (3) Are there room situations that completely prevent the air cleaner from filtering the air? (4) Does the air cleaner flow make the stay in the room uncomfortable? To answer these questions, particle imaging methods were employed. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) was used to determine the flow field in the proximity of the air cleaner inlet and outlet to assess regions of unpleasant air movements. The filtering efficiency was quantified by means of particle image counting as a measure for the particle concentration at multiple locations in the room simultaneously. Moreover, different room occupancies and room geometries were investigated. Our results confirm that mobile air cleaners are suitable devices for reducing the viral load indoors. Elongated room geometries, e.g., hallways, lead to a reduced filtering efficiency, which needs to be compensated by increasing the volume flow rate of the device or by deploying multiple smaller devices. As compared to an empty room, a room occupied with desks, desk separation walls, and people does not change the filtering efficiency significantly, i.e., the change was less than 10%. Finally, the flow induced by the investigated mobile air cleaner does not reach uncomfortable levels, as by defined room comfort standards under these conditions, while at the same time reaching air exchange rates above 6, a value which is recommended for potentially infectious environments.
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Effective ventilation systems are essential to control the transmission of airborne aerosol particles, such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus in aircraft cabins, which is a significant concern for people commuting by airplane. Validated computational fluid dynamic models are frequently and effectively used to investigate air distribution and pollutant transport. In this study, the effectiveness of different ventilation systems with varying outlet vent locations were computationally compared to determine the best ventilation system for minimizing the risk of airborne transmission. The cabin air conditioning system was optimized to determine how design variables (air inlet temperature, outlet valve width and location, and mass flow rate) affect output parameters, including particle residence time, age of air, and thermal comfort conditions. Inlet mass flow rate was observed to be an influential variable impacting all output parameters, especially on age of air, where it was the most influential. In contrast, the least effective variable was width of the outlet valve, which only affected the particle residence time. Also, Predicted Mean Vote and Predicted Percentage Dissatisfied indices were the most affected by air inlet temperature, which had an inverse relation, while the outlet valve location had the greatest effect on particle residence time. © 2023 Author(s).
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The energy consumption of Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems accounts for a large proportion of global energy usage so even a small percentage of energy savings in these systems will account for important absolute value savings. One such saving can be realized by better designs as well as optimizing existing air distribution system. The indoor air quality (IAQ) is also greatly impacted by the air distribution system. In this work, the task of optimizing both the placement and the design of diffusers is investigated so acceptable Air Changes per Hour (ACH) numbers are attained with less energy consumption and good thermal comfort. The ANSYS Fluent software was used to optimize the design and placement of a newly developed diffuser. The proposed air distribution system is design to produce conditions like what one would experience while standing outside in a small breeze while experiencing perfect weather (room temperature, uniform air temperature distribution, air speed less than 2 m/s) [1]). This work is an extension of a previous study where a new diffuser design was proposed, which takes advantage of the Coanda effect [2]. The numerical analysis includes realistic models of a 9 × 9 × 3 m (width × length × height) classroom, which is occupied by students and a teacher. To be more realistic, it includes furniture, a door and windows. The simulated Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system complies with ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) standards for acceptable air quality. This investigation proposes a template on how anyone can optimize the location and placement of the air diffusers while achieving both thermal comfort and good IAQ. While this work was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic this is foreseen to be an important ongoing issue and could lead to future advances in HAVC system that improve IAQ and produce better thermal comfort with improved energy savings. Copyright © 2022 by ASME.
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This study experimentally measured the ventilation efficiency in road vehicles. Two air circulation methods, air conditioning and opening windows, were considered and their ventilation efficiencies were measured for a sedan and a cutaway bus. The ventilation efficiencies have been evaluated by measuring the aerosol concentration parameter at different locations inside the vehicle. For both vehicles, any of the ventilation scenarios significantly increased the air exchange rate. The best performance was shown when all windows were open in a moving vehicle. As an illustration of using the obtained measurements, respiratory infection probability was calculated using the Wells-Riley model. Any of the ventilation cases significantly decreased the infection risk. The ventilation efficiency and infection probability were highly dependent on the air circulation method and vehicle type. © 2023 The Author(s)