Assessment of the infection risk distribution of COVID-19 and ventilation energy consumptions in indoor environments

Abstract

The energy use for ventilating buildings involves high economic and primary energy consumption costs. Nevertheless, ventilation is essential, especially in public places, to ensure acceptable Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) levels and reduce the risk of airborne virus infection. The latter aspect has recently increased because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, a model that couples a zonal ventilation model with infection risk calculation is integrated with an energy consumption model to analyse the energy consumption and infection risk from COVID-19 at different ventilation flow rates for three case studies: an office room, a high school and a university classroom. The main results show that the increase in ventilation flow rate involves reducing risk, but it increases energy consumption. Moreover, the mask-wearing resulted in having a relevant effect, whereas the effect of the relative position difference inside the room was not detected with the proposed discretisation.