Indoor environmental quality of classrooms in Southern European climate

• Author(s): Almeida, Ricardo ; Freitas, Vasco
• Date: 2014
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.19/2228
• Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico de Viseu
• Subject(s): Carbon dioxide concentration; indoor environmental quality; relative humidity; school building retrofit; temperature; ventilation rates
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

The indoor environmental quality within a classroom is linked to the health, comfort and performanceof students. It is well established that there are classroom environments where indoor environmentalquality is poor. Therefore, the rehabilitation of school buildings is assumed as an appropriate strategy.Consequently, some countries have sponsored nationwide programs for the rehabilitation of school build-ings, whose result has been, in some cases, other than the expected. Classrooms performance in serviceconditions must be evaluated and, from the results, optimized solutions should be established and care-fully designed and executed to have the desired effect. Thus, a research project was defined, aiming toassess the impact of retrofit on the indoor environmental quality of school buildings. The methodologyused included the in situ measurement of temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide concentrationand ventilation rates. A total of 24 classrooms of 9 school buildings (2 non-retrofitted and 7 recentlyretrofitted) were studied. A long term monitoring was defined with three measurement campaigns:winter, mid-season and summer conditions, each with three weeks length. The results confirmed thatnon-retrofitted schools need to improve their indoor environmental conditions and in retrofitted build-ings mechanical ventilation systems are not being used, with important consequences on the indoor airquality.