Personalized Environmental Control Systems (PECS) operation and evaluation

   DESCRIPTION OF THE SESSION

Personalized Environmental Control System (PECS) with heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, and acoustic management functions can provide localized environment control according to the user’s preference. Their implementation could reduce the conditioning need of the space (e.g. total volume), which would improve the energy efficiency of the entire heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system substantially. At the same time, PECS would improve personal comfort, health, and well-being. Personalized ventilation will protect against cross contamination, a critical issue in open-plan offices and work places with close distance. The application is for work places with mainly sedentary activity such as offices. As buildings will need to be pandemic-proofed and resilient in cases of extreme events (e.g. heatwaves), an increasing interest and market is expected for PECS.

IEA EBC Annex (Annex 87 – Energy and Indoor Environmental Quality Performance of Personalised Environmental Control Systems) has the overall objective to establish design criteria and operation guidelines for PECS and to quantify the benefits regarding health, comfort, energy, and cost performance. This includes also control concepts and guidelines for operating PECS in spaces with general ambient systems for heating, cooling, ventilation and lighting. The scope includes all types of PECS for local heating, cooling, ventilation, air cleaning, lighting and acoustic. It includes desktop systems (e.g. mounted on desks), systems integrated in furniture (e.g. chairs), and wearables (e.g. garments or devices attached to occupants’ body). The Annex consists of five subtasks:

  • Fundamentals
  • Applications and technologies
  • Control, operation, and system integration
  • IEQ and energy performance evaluation
  • Policy and marketing actions.

The session will introduce Annex 87 and discuss aspects related to PECS operation and evaluation. Current indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and energy performance evaluation methods alongside used key performance indicators (KPIs) will be described. Examples of both traditional and advanced control strategies will be presented. A secondary objective of the session is to gather input from the conference audience on the aforementioned topics.

   OBJECTIVES OF THE SESSION

  • Introduce IEA EBC Annex 87
  • Discuss challenges of PECS operation
  • Provide examples of automatic control strategies
  • Describe current indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and energy performance evaluation methods for PECS
  • Present key performance indicators (KPIs) for PECS IEQ and energy performance evaluation

   SESSION PROGRAMME

    1. Introduction to IEA EBC Annex 87,  Bjarne W. Olesen, International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
    2. Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and energy performance evaluation of PECS, Douaa Al-Assaad, Building Physics and Sustainable Design, KU Leuven, Belgium
    3. Physiological sensing for thermal comfort assessment, Dragos-Ioan Bogatu, International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

  SESSION CHAIRS

    1. Bjarne W. Olesen, International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
    2. Dragos-Ioan Bogatu, International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark

    SESSION DURATION
60 minutes

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Prof. Sani Dimitroulopoulou (UK Health Security Agency, UKHSA)

Sani is a Principal Environmental Public Health Scientist, Air Quality and Public Health, UKHSA (formerly Public Health England, PHE) leading on indoor air quality and health.
She is also Visiting Professor, at Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, The Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, UCL.
 
Her research interests include exposure assessment to air pollution, based on modelling and monitoring of outdoor and indoor air pollution and ventilation, health impact assessments and development of environmental public health indicators and indoor air quality guidelines.
She works closely with colleagues from UK Government Departments (e.g. DHSC, DfE, DLUHC, Defra, DESNZ) and Organisations (e.g. WHO, NICE, CIBSE, RCP/RCPCH, BSI) to provide expert advice on indoor air quality and health. She participated in the Cross Whitehall Group for the revision of the Building Regulations, Part F and she sits on the Advisory Board organised by DLUHC for the revision of HHSRS (Housing Health and Safety Rating System). She was the UKHSA project manager for the development of the DHSC/UKHSA/DLUHC guidance on “Damp and mould: understanding and addressing the health risks for rented housing providers”. She is the Chair of UK Indoor Environments Group (UKIEG).

Dr. Ana Maria Scutaru

Ana Maria Scutaru is a scientist at the German Environment Agency (UBA) in Berlin. She received her PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the Institute of Pharmacy at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2011. Her work focuses on the health-related evaluation of building products emissions into indoor air and other indoor air related topics. Ana Maria Scutaru is the secretary of the Committee for Health-related Evaluation of Building Products (AgBB) and of the EU-LCI Working Group within the harmonisation framework for health-based evaluation of indoor emissions from construction products in the European Union.

Corinne Mandin earned her PhD in environmental chemistry from the University of Rennes, France.
She has been working on human exposure to chemical substances and physical agents and the related health effects, first at INERIS (French national institute for industrial environment and risks) for 8 years, and then at CSTB (French scientific and technical center for building) for 13 years. At CSTB, she coordinated the French Indoor Air Quality Observatory, a public research program created in 2001 to carry out nationwide surveys on air quality in buildings. In 2022, she joined the French institute for radiation protection and nuclear safety (IRSN) where she leads the radiation epidemiology group.
She has been involved in various European and international projects and expert committees, including at the World Health Organization and the European Joint Research Center. She is currently chairing the expert committee dedicated to outdoor and indoor air quality at the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (Anses). She was president of the International Society for Indoor Air Quality and Climate (ISIAQ) from 2020 to 2022. In 2022, she coedited the Handbook of Indoor Air Quality (Springer).