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Program Meeting 3 – Indoor Environment – Health Comfort and Productivity

November 18 @ 4:30 pm - 9:00 pm

$60

People spend in industrialized countries more than 90 % of their lives in an artificial indoor environment (home, transportation, work). This makes the indoor environment much more important for people health and comfort than the outdoor environment. In typical office buildings the cost of people is a factor 100 higher than energy costs, which make the performance of people at their work significantly more important than energy costs. The task is to optimize indoor environmental conditions for health, comfort and performance while conserving energy, since more than one third of current global energy consumption is used to maintain indoor environments. Detailed field investigations of the indoor environment in hundreds of large office buildings in many parts of the world have documented that the indoor environmental quality is typically rather mediocre, with many people dissatisfied and many suffering from sick-building syndrome symptoms. Recent studies under laboratory conditions and in the field have shown a significant influence of the indoor environment on people’s productivity. Also studies on people sick leaves show a very high loss of work time and performance, which have significant economic consequences for companies.

The paper presents an update on today’s requirement for a healthy and comfortable environment. The paper will mainly be dealing with the indoor thermal environment and air quality. Several standards and guidelines are specifying requirements related to comfort and to health; but the productivity of people is not taken into account. Recent studies showing that comfortable room temperatures, increased ventilation above normal recommendation, reduction of indoor pollution sources and more effective ventilation increases the performance of people. The results indicate increase of productivity of 5-10 %. Also based on the laboratory studies a 10 % increase in dissatisfaction decreases the productivity with around 1 %.

Speaker Bio:

Bjarne W. Olesen, Ph.D. – Professor, Technical University of Denmark

Bjarne has a Master’s degree in civil engineering (1972) and a Ph.D. from the Laboratory of heating and Air Conditioning, Technical University of Denmark (1975). In the period 1972-1990 he was a research scientist at the Laboratory of Heating and Air Conditioning. Part time affiliated as product manager at Brüel & Kjaer 1978-1992. Senior Research Scientist, College of Architecture, Virginia Tech. in the period 1992-1993. Since 1993 until January 2004, Bjarne was the Head of Research & Development at UPONOR-VELTA, Germany. Since January 2004 he has been a full professor at the International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy, Technical University of Denmark.

Bjarne has received the Ralph Nevins Award (1982), Distinguish Service Award (1997), Fellow Award (2001) and Exceptional Service Award (2006) from ASHRAE. He was awarded the Medal of Honour from the German Engineering Society (VDI-TGA, 2005), International Honorary Member of SHASE (Society of Heating, Air-Conditioning and Sanitary Engineers of Japan) and Honorary member of AICARR (Italian Society for HVAC). He was ASHRAE Society President for the 2017-18 year.

Bjarne is active in several ASHRAE-CEN-ISO standard committees regarding indoor environment and energy performance of buildings and HVAC systems. Has published more than 450 papers including more than 90 in peer reviewed journals.