Abstract
Recently, many studies have focused on studying indoor air quality, especially with the outbreak of COVID-19, which is one of the reasons for the increased need to improve indoor air quality. Many ideas and applications are available to incorporate nature into buildings to improve indoor air quality (IAQ) and thus secure a higher percentage of natural ventilation and pollution reduction. One of these ideas is to use "breathing walls" (BWs), which are envelope components based on porous materials. They decrease energy consumed for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning of buildings. The study discusses the effect of using the BW approach on thermal comfort in buildings. Moreover, the improvement in the IAQ when using two models - one using BWs (applying natural and industrial materials together on the BWs, which are composed of wooden concrete hollow bricks (WCHBs)), and the other model built with solid traditional bricks (STB) - was studied through an experiment to compare air temperature, carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>) concentration, indoor relative humidity and thermal behavior. The experiments were conducted on the two models for five months in the summer of 2019, and the results of both models were compared. From the results, it may be concluded that the model with BWs exhibits improved thermal behavior than the model with traditional bricks by recording on average three to five degrees lower than the outside temperature. Moreover, the relative humidity is lower in the WCHB model than in the STB model by ~41.66% in the same conditions; however, the CO<sub>2</sub> concentration (ppm) in the WCHB model was lower than that in the STB model by ~28.5% in the same conditions.
Highlights
During the spread of the COVID-19 virus pandemic, many countries of the world have taken many measures to reduce the repercussions of the pandemic [1]
The first model was constructed with solid traditional bricks (STBs); the second was constructed with the proposed breathing walls” (BWs) composed of wooden concrete hollow bricks (WCHBs)
Smart BWs are one of the modern ideas that work on activating the performance of the building, adapting to environmental changes, and reducing the energy used for air-conditioning and refrigeration because it depends on natural ventilation more
Summary
During the spread of the COVID-19 virus pandemic, many countries of the world have taken many measures to reduce the repercussions of the pandemic [1]. The first preventive measure was home isolation [2]. Despite the importance of home isolation as an effective means to limit the spread of the virus, it had negative effects in unventilated spaces, which leads to health problems for individuals, such as irritability, breathing problems, and heart disease. An important issue of housing quality is reported to be strongly related to building envelopes, which are the most durable building components that serve during the entire building lifetime. A wall should not just be an enclosure but should provide far more than just protection. A correctly built and laid out wall is an
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