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Buildings & Construction

Indoor air quality

News and Updates

A newly built two-story home with an attached garage has solar panels on the roof.

A House Ahead of Its Time

A decade in, NIST’s superefficient house continues to generate results and advance building science.

Projects and Programs

Illustrated cutaway showing the inside of the Net Zero Energy House

Net-Zero Energy, High-Performance Buildings Program

Ongoing
Objective: To develop and deploy advances in measurement science to continue moving the nation toward net-zero energy, high-performance buildings while maintaining healthier and more resilient indoor environments. What is the problem? Buildings account for 40 % of the primary energy consumption, 74
Measurement of the air velocity profile exiting a section of the rooftop air-conditioning unit's heat exchanger

Space-Conditioning Options for Energy-Efficient Buildings

Ongoing
Objective: Develop and deploy the measurement science to support the development and implementation of the most efficient and cost-effective space-conditioning options for energy-efficient buildings. What is the new technical idea? (Tasks 1-4): The unique aspects of high-efficiency homes require new
CO2 Estimate

Ventilation Performance for Novel Sustainability and Resilience Challenges

Ongoing
Objective: To develop tools, metrics, and data to enable sustainable, resilient, high-performance building and ventilation system design and operation in response to current and future challenges driven by climate change, airborne disease transmission, and other developing hazards. Also, to develop
The Metrics & Tools project assesses whole building sustainability for buildings located in 228 U.S. cities.

Metrics and Tools for Sustainable Buildings

Ongoing
Objective: Develop, integrate, apply, and deploy measurement science assessing the sustainability performance of energy technologies and systems in an integrated building design and operation context, and provide the necessary information to stakeholders to make more sustainable choices in

Publications

Chemical characteristics of indoor aerosol particles and surface films

Author(s)
Rachel O'Brien, Cate Shirilla, Amy Hrdina, Emily Legaard, Kathryn Mayer, Marina Vance, Dustin Poppendieck, Delphine Farmer
Indoor surfaces and the films on them play important roles in indoor air quality due to the high surface area to volume ratios in our homes. The chemical

Software

CONTAM

CONTAM is a multizone indoor air quality and ventilation analysis computer program designed to help you determine: (a) airflows: infiltration, exfiltration, and
Figure of FaTIMA model

FaTIMA

The web-based tool Fate and Transport of Indoor Microbiological Aerosols (FaTIMA) allows for the determination of the indoor fate of microbiological aerosols

Tools and Instruments

IAQ test house

Indoor Air Quality Test House

In order to enable studies of a range of indoor air quality and ventilation issues, EL maintains a highly instrumented three-bedroom test house. Previous