Buildings journal invites IAQ articles

Buildings, an international, scientific, peer-reviewed, open-access journal on building science, building engineering and architecture published monthly online by MDPI, is seeking submissions for a special issue dedicated to indoor air quality.

Guest editors Dr Shamila Haddad and Dr Arianna Brambilla from the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney, and Professor Dr Baojie He from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Chongqing University, note that pollutants from indoor sources are found at high concentrations in the absence of proper ventilation in buildings.

“Pollutants such as fungi, microbial contamination, house dust mites, particulates and air toxins such as formaldehyde can adversely affect indoor air quality,” they say.

“Healthy building environments play an important role in reducing the spread of infectious disease. Climate change can also influence local air quality by increasing the ground-level ozone in many regions, which may present challenges in the future. Global and local overheating also result in more frequent extreme events with high magnitudes such bushfires, which can ultimately affect particulate matter with a diameter less than 2.5μm (PM_2.5) concentrations and cause adverse health impact for the population exposed to bushfire.

“Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to understand how indoor air quality (IAQ) impacts lives and how to improve it for cleaner and healthier air. Currently, with the advances of low-cost sensing technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, artificial intelligence (AI), computational modelling, smart solutions, nature-based solutions and urban heat mitigation and adaptation technologies are developed to help tackle the challenge of assessing and improving the IAQ of buildings and homes.”

The editors seek high-quality and original contributions containing fundamental and applied research, case studies or state of the art that present new insights, innovative approaches, ideas and solutions aiming to assess and solve or mitigate air quality issues in indoor environments.

Research topics include:

• The influence of outdoor air pollution in indoor air quality
• Low-cost sensing and IoT technologies to increase indoor air quality monitoring
• Impacts of indoor air quality on human health
• Indoor air quality modeling
• Building retrofitting and smart solutions for improving indoor air quality
• Nature-based ideas and solutions to improve indoor air quality
• Case studies of indoor air quality monitoring
• Performance, simulation and experimental testing of healthy buildings
• Indoor/outdoor air quality modeling and AI-driven approaches to assess indoor air quality
• Extreme heat events and bushfires, and their impacts on health
• Climate change and increase in pollutants, surface-level ozone and tropospheric ozone.

Deadline for manuscript submissions is April 29, 2024.

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