Indoor Air Quality in Buildings

Dear Colleagues,

It is estimated that people spend 80–90% of their time in indoor environments, such as homes, offices and schools. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that almost all of the global population (99%) is exposed to high levels of pollutants. Indoor air quality can be defined as the total attributes of indoor air that affect a person's health and wellbeing, as well as environment. These impacts carry a significant cost burden to the economy and health systems. Indoor exposures to air pollutants have been associated with impaired health and performance in children and adults. Children, older adults, individuals with preexisting conditions and households of low socioeconomic status are often exposed to higher levels of indoor pollutants.

Pollutants being released from indoor sources are being found at high concentrations in the absence of proper ventilation in the building. Pollutants such as fungi, microbial contamination, house dust mites, particulates and air toxics such as formaldehyde can adversely affect indoor air quality. 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 2.5 μm (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 modeling, smart solutions, nature-based solutions and urban heat mitigation and adptation technologies are developed to help tackle the challenge of assessing and improving the IAQ of buildings and homes.

This Special Issue seeks to find high-quality and riginal 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, but not limited to:

• 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 bushfire, and their impacts on health;
• Climate change and increase in pollutants, surface-level ozone and tropospheric ozone.

We hope this Special Issue will provide a timely overview of the recent theoretical and technological advances, laboratory and field testing, and design methods.

Dr. Shamila Haddad
Dr. Arianna Brambilla
Prof. Dr. Baojie He
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• indoor air quality
• net-zero smart buildings
• energy efficiency measures
• comfort and productivity
• building energy retrofiting
• low-cost sensing and IoT technologies
• urban overheating
• extreme heat, bushfires and health