Roughly 55 million students and seven million staff attend the 130,000 public and private schools each day in the United States. At any given time, each of those people are susceptible to various types of illness, many of which are communicated through the air. Ironically,...
HVAC systems can be a blessing or a curse when it comes to disease transmission and infection control. In fact, according to ASHRAE, the transmission of infectious airborne diseases such as tuberculosis, influenza and the common cold can be accelerated or controlled by a building’s...
Clean air is not only good for your lungs, but also for your brain, according to new research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health's Center for Health and the Global Environment. To help conserve energy, building engineers have made significant progress over...
Modern UV lighting for HVAC systems resembles fluorescent lamps typically found in commercial office buildings. Both types of lamps have similar form and operate using identical electrochemical processes: an electric discharge through argon gas strikes mercury vapor to generate a photon with a wavelength of...
UV light comprises a segment of the electromagnetic spectrum between 400 and 100 nm, corresponding to photon energies from 3 to 124 eV. The UV segment has four sections, labeled UV-A (400 to 315 nm), UV-B (315 to 280 nm), very high energy and destructive...
If you’re a dental or other healthcare professional, customers no doubt appreciate your use of personal protective equipment (PPE), routine equipment sterilization and easy-to-clean fabrics and furniture. There’s a definite reassurance when a healthcare professional opens a fresh set of latex gloves or instruments. To...
Many factors can impact a building’s environmental performance and the consumption of energy, water and materials. Manufacturers of building systems design performance around a specific, optimal condition. Over time, these performance standards will deteriorate if nothing is done to preserve the original “as-built” condition. This...
ASHRAE recently released two position documents (links listed below) examining the health consequences of using filtration and air cleaning technologies in HVAC systems. Our own Dean Saputa is an active member of one of the committees responsible for this research (the ASHRAE Filtration and Air...