Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Classrooms at the University of the Basque Country through a User-Informed Natural Ventilation Demonstrator

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a renewed interest in indoor air quality to limit viral spread. In the case of educational spaces, due to the high concentration of people and the fact that most of the existing buildings do not have any mechanical ventilation system, the different administrations have established natural ventilation protocols to guarantee an air quality that reduces risk of contagion by the SARS-CoV-2 virus after the return to the classrooms. Many of the initial protocols established a ventilation pattern that opted for continuous or intermittent ventilation to varying degrees of intensity. This study, carried out on a university campus in Spain, analyses the performance of natural ventilation activated through the information provided by monitoring and visualisation of real-time data. In order to carry out this analysis, a experiment was set up where a preliminary study of ventilation without providing information to the users was carried out, which was then compared with the result of providing live feedback to the occupants of two classrooms and an administration office in different periods of 2020, 2021 and 2022. In the administration office, a CO2-concentration-based method was applied retrospectively to assess the risk of airborne infection. This experience has served as a basis to establish a route for user-informed improvement of air quality in educational spaces in general through low-cost systems that allow a rational use of natural ventilation while helping maintain an adequate compromise between IAQ, comfort and energy consumption, without having to resort to mechanical ventilation systems.

Characterization of the Thermal Behavior of Semi-Exterior Laundry Spaces in an Overheating Passivhaus Residential Building in Bilbao, Spain

“…The collected data and its analysis have allowed for us to determine that the temperatures reached in the studied spaces are significantly higher that the outdoor climate, in line with the already documented phenomenon of indoor overheating in previous publications [21,30]. The three semi-exterior laundries reach high temperatures, especially during the summer, in a process that appears to be partially driven by direct solar radiation, albeit with some lag relative to the outside temperature, in an operation comparable to that of a car parked in the sun.…”

“…To monitor the conditions of laundry 2, the RTR-574 datalogger was used, with the same accuracy as the TR72 device. A more exhaustive explanation of the instruments that were employed can be found in [20,30].…”

Evaluating the Feasibility of Hybrid Ventilation in Educational Spaces: A Simulation Study in the Basque Country Climate

“…This has made it possible to observe the poor air quality in some periods. The results of these monitoring are available at [13]. The classroom has a maximum capacity of 72 students.…”

Critical Review of the Literature on Thermal Comfort in Educational Buildings: Study of the Influence of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…These parameters are two of the four environmental factors, together with air velocity and mean radiant temperature, whose measurement is necessary to carry out any objective study of thermal comfort [267][268][269][270]. In most of the works that have studied the ventilation measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, the aforementioned indices have been used exclusively to establish some relationship with the existing thermal comfort conditions [43,44,47,146,225,230,237,239].…”

“…Concerning the approach used in the COVID-19 studies, most of the studies (70.83%) have been carried out using methods other than the rational and/or adaptive approach. 20 Indoor Air This is because most of these studies focus on assessing how natural ventilation conditions have influenced ambient temperature and relative humidity, thus evaluating thermal comfort only with these parameters [44,47,239].…”