Editorial

Did you know that 8th November is the World Ventil8 Day (https://www.worldventil8day.com/) which aims to raise awareness of the importance of ventilation? REHVA is one of the initiators who would like to promote the importance of ventilation as a crucial part of enabling health and wellbeing of people indoors.

In this issue of REHVA Journal you can find a few articles concerning ventilation. Two of them are related to the ventilation of schools. As you probably know from your own (professional) experience, in many countries we still have problems with ventilation of school buildings. Very often, there isn’t any mechanical ventilation in classrooms, which became a real problem during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rob McLeod and his colleagues in Austria wrote about their study performed at TU Graz, where they were looking at the relation between the ventilation rate and/or wearing a mask in classrooms and the risk of infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Another article related to school ventilation is from Piet Jacobs and his colleagues. You can read about their SchoolVent project in Dutch schools where they looked not only at IAQ but also at improved thermal comfort. That is of course, an ideal situation if we can improve both of these IEQ parameters without compromising others (noise, for example).

Two other articles related to ventilation are shortened versions of papers from the Healthy Buildings Europe 2023 conference organized in June in Achen, Germany. If you have been there, you must have noticed that there weren’t many ventilation related papers. The conference theme was ‘Beyond disciplinary boundaries’ and it was really a good mix referring to all IEQ factors and beyond. Many papers were related to the societal challenges which are also adopted by REHVA. You can read two of such papers in this issue.

The Program of Requirements Healthy Dwellings is an example of an initiative to help customers (in this case housing associations) to comprehensively approach building and/or renovation of their houses. The aim is to enable specifying of not only sustainability and energy related requirements but also IEQ requirements specific for dwellings.

The last paper I would like to mention, is written by Mahmoud ELMokadem and his colleagues at RWTH in Aachen, which discusses the combination of IAQ issues with AI (artificial intelligence).

I hope you enjoy reading this issue and if you would like to contribute to the REHVA Journal yourself, please reach out to the main editor.