Theme Leads: Malcolm Cook and Maarten van Reeuwijk
14th September 2021 – Theme one workshop: Perspectives on ventilation and air quality modelling – click here to watch presentations
Theme 1 focuses on mechanisms for ingress and egress of pollutants in buildings and the tools and techniques for quantifying this exchange. Through three co-creation workshops we will bring together researchers, practitioners, policy makers and regulators to establish:
- the technical requirements for models from a health, ventilation, design and regulatory perspective;
- models and data sets that are currently available and their strength/weaknesses;
- approaches to characterise human behaviour within flow models;
- systematic differences in characterising indoor-outdoor exchange for building types for specific vulnerable groups (e.g. hospitals, schools, homes, community centres); and
- opportunities arising from technology advances (wearable sensors, machine learning techniques).
We will explore the full range of model types including analytical models, spreadsheet tools, CFD, pollutant particle tracking and machine learning using sparse data, and consider explicitly how to couple flow models with dose-response approaches to quantify short term and cumulative health risks. Workshop outcomes will be used to identify gaps in our understanding and modelling capability, and will ultimately lead to a set of grand challenges. Seed funding will be used to explore aspects of how we can couple indoor and outdoor flow/pollutant transport models at neighbourhood scale consistent with the Clean Air Framework. We will bring together existing tools and techniques from across the team and wider network in the context to specific neighbourhood areas to identify how we can use different approaches together to conduct a holistic flow evaluation. Through all these activities we will bring together the required expertise to pursue the larger technical challenges using follow-up funding.
