A novel quantitative assessment framework of the IAQ resilience performance of buildings: The resilience score metric

Abstract

Resilience performance in building design has emerged as a critical consideration in the face of increasing uncertainties or ‘shocks’ posed by natural disasters, climate change & excessive pollution. To evaluate and optimize building design decisions, holistic performance metrics are needed. This work defines a novel quantitative assessment framework of indoor air quality (IAQ) resilience which output is the resilience score (RS) metric that integrates all resilience aspects and building-relevant pollutants. The framework was demonstrated via simulations on a validated model of a case study educational building in Belgium for 3 ventilations systems: constant air volume (CAV), demand-controlled ventilation (DCV), DCV without filters, and 3 shock types (mechanical MS, internal IS, outdoor shocks OS). Results showed that OS was the least critical shock type, followed by IS and MS. With increasing degree of shock, RSMS decreased for all 3 systems linearly by 64% until 2.8 h of power outage, beyond which the rate of decrease slowed down considerably. CAV & DCV had the same RSMS and that of DCV w/o filters was 13% lower. The RSIS for CAV & DCV deteriorated by 38.8% & 46% before plateauing at values of 0.45 & 0.36 respectively. CAV had better resilience against IS. The effect of filters did not reflect in the RSIS. The RSOS for CAV & DCV deteriorated by 51% & 26% before plateauing at values of 0.49 & 0.73 respectively. DCV had the best resilience against OS, followed by DCV w/o filters & CAV.