The COVID challenge : How to Make Buildings Breathe Better

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Mon, 2020-11-09 17:58 — mike kraft

The Next Covid Dilemma: How to Make Buildings Breathe Better Better indoor ventilation systems could make people safer and healthier—and not just because they’d slow down the coronavirus. Adam Rogers Wired

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As the number of people infected with Covid-19 in the US breaks records, and cooped-up kids and suffering business owners agitate for a life slightly more normal, the once boring ventilation and filter systems in the guts of homes, schools, offices, and factories have become a focus of debate. People know that if they want to go back inside those buildings—even while masked and 6 feet away from each other—something has to vent potentially virus-infused air.

That means a renewed interest in HVAC, and possibly a new future for an often-overlooked field of science. Maybe. “The best HVAC in the world performs poorly when it’s not well maintained, and the usual standard is ‘not well maintained,’” Siegel says. “What we’re seeing now in the pandemic is that people want HVAC to help us, and it’s like, wait a second—you’ve systematically underinvested and not done the kinds of things you should do to have a well-functioning system.”

On the other hand, that might mean a new future for ventilation is emerging, and along with it a new way of seeing the future of building design and engineering—because trying to Covid-proof a home or office might make it better in all sorts of other ways, too. ...

SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory coronavirus that almost certainly has among its modes of transmission the ability to move almost like a vapor, in invisible bubbles of snot and spit or dessicated protein that waft on air currents, emitted by people showing no symptoms of illness. Transmission is most common indoors, where the air doesn’t exchange as often as it does outside. So one of the biggest ideas for decreasing transmission but still letting people go back to school and work safely—not to mention places like restaurants, theaters, and bookstores—is ventilation: getting potentially infectious viral particles in the air out, and clean air in.

“Those of us in this field have been arguing for decades that we need to pay attention to the indoor environment, and we’re thrilled people are recognizing it’s important. But how to get from here to there will take an infusion of investment,” says Shelly Miller, a mechanical engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies indoor air. “We view outside air and water as shared goods. This is something everybody shares. I don’t really see why it would be any different from the air in a building, because lots of people share the air in the building. We just haven’t looked at it that way.”

The basics of the technology are already there, deployed in specialized environments like hospitals. “It’s really the idea of equivalent air changes, or clean air delivery that is the sum of the outdoor air delivered to spaces to dilute contaminants and particulates,” says William Bahnfleth, an architectural engineer at Penn State and a lead researcher with the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, or ASHRAE, a standards-setting organization for the field. ...

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