To alleviate worker's thermal discomfort in a moderately hot environment, a new cooling vest was designed and proposed in this paper. To investigate the effect of the cooling vest and to collect the knowledge for the design of comfortable cooling vest, subjective experiments were conducted. Two kinds of cooling vests, the new one and the commercially available one, were used for comparison. The new cooling vest had more insulation and its surface temperature was higher than the commercially available one. Experiments were performed in the climatic chamber where operative temperature was controlled at 30.2°C and relative humidity was at 37% under still air. In addition, experiment without cooling vest was carried out as a control condition. The results obtained in these experiments were as follow: 1) By wearing both types of cooling vest, the whole body thermal sensation was closer to the neutral conditions than those without cooling vest. This effect was estimated to be equal to the 5.7°C decrement of operative temperature. The subjects felt more comfortable with the cooling vest than without it. They felt more thermally acceptable than that without cooling vest. Wearing the cooling vest was useful to decrease the sweating sensation. 2) The local discomfort was observed when the local thermal sensation was "cool"~"cold" with the cooling vest.3) The new cooling vest kept the skin temperature at chest at about 32.6°C. On the other hand, by wearing the commercially available one, it lowered to about 31.1°C. By wearing the new cooling vest, there was a tendency that local thermal sensation vote was higher and local comfort sensation vote was more comfortable than those of the condition wearing the commercially available one. It is important for the design of a comfortable cooling garment to prevent over-cool down from the body.

Information on airconditioning and ventilation has been continuously disseminated in response to the Japanese Government's announcement of the need for appropriate ventilation measures against the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), and the issuing of an emergency presidential discourse by the presidents of Engineering Societies. In this paper, we add to the information the latest knowledge on the behavior of SARS-CoV-2 in air, describe its diffusion characteristics in the built environment, and summarize the effects of temperature and humidity on the virus. Then we recommend varying approaches of airconditioning control for facility type.

We have developed an energy-saving operations system featuring remote operation of central monitoring equipment installed in a building. This system applies robotic process automation to remote operation to automatically perform energy-saving operations on behalf of the operations manager. Furthermore, as another feature, the system requires only a local area network to connect to the central monitoring equipment enabling automatic operation to be performed regardless of the specifications of the central monitoring equipment. The items targeted for energy-saving operation by this system are the optimal operation of a heat source system, setting of the supply water temperature of heat source equipment, setting of room temperature, and setting of outside-air intake volume. At present, the operations manager has the role of performing these energy-saving operations, but finding the optimal value for each of these operations is a difficult task. An operations manager, moreover, is responsible for tasks other than facility operations such as maintenance management, so changing optimal settings accurately at regular intervals on an ongoing basis can be quite a burden. This system uses robotic process automation technology, so it is capable of performing all energy-saving operations that can be executed by the central monitoring equipment. We installed this system in a large-scale shopping mall and performed energy-saving operations on outside-air processing units. In this trial, we achieved a 44% reduction in the amount of energy required for outside-air processing and a 47% reduction in CO2 emissions.

No abstract

Advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies since 2005 have revolutionized biological science. One particular application of NGS technologies is to elucidate microbiomes in built environments. We are currently conducting a series of studies on the elucidation and control of mass infection mechanisms based on dynamic measurement of environment microbiomes. The objective of this study is to clarify the dispersion characteristics of oral bacteria in the built environment. Bacterial communities from occupants' hands and oral cavities, doorknobs, desk and keyboard surfaces, and air in laboratories were investigated in seven Japanese universities. The median relative abundances of Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, and Fusobacteria were 41%, 31%, 12%, 7%, and 3%, respectively. Moreover, the main genera detected were Streptococcus (27.6%), Haemophilus (7.0%), Staphylococcus (5.6%), Neisseria (5.6%), Corynebacterium (4.7%), Rothia (3.2%), Prevotella (3.0%), Fusobacterium (2.6%), Veillonella (1.7%), Leptotrichia (1.7%), Enhydrobacter (1.7%), Lactobacillus (1.3%), Acinetobacter (1.3%), and Actinomyces (1.1%). The oral bacteria Actinomyces, Corynebacterium, Fusobacterium, Haemophilus, Leptotrichia, Neisseria, Prevotella, Rothia, and Streptococcus were observed in indoor air and on surfaces as well as in oral cavities. Furthermore, Prevotella melaninogenica and Rothia mucilaginosa were observed in all samples, including those from hands and oral cavities, doorknobs, desk and PC keyboard surfaces, and air in laboratories, in all seven universities. Keywords built environment, dispersion characteristics, environmental monitoring, indoor microbiome, oral cavity bacteriaThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.