Lessons from NASA and the Navy: How to design buildings to protect us from polluted outside air and emit less carbon

Over the past few years, I have read a growing number of headlines about wildfires and their impacts on the air we breathe. Yesterday, the headlines about hazardous air quality in the Northeast due to the fires in Canada hit much closer to home when my daughter’s lacrosse practice was cancelled due to poor outdoor air quality. This was a first for many of us living in metro-Boston, and the direct (albeit small) impact on our daily lives was a good reminder of why our work at enVerid Systems is so important.  

Our mission at enVerid is to reduce the cost and carbon emissions of heating, ventilating, and air conditioning commercial buildings. We also want to make the places in which we learn and work more resilient to polluted outside air, which unfortunately is an issue in many cities regardless of wildfires.   

Building ventilation is the second largest energy use in commercial buildings in the U.S. The reason we ventilate buildings is “…to provide indoor air quality that is acceptable to humans and minimizes adverse health effects” (ASHRAE Standard 62.1, Ventilation & Acceptable Indoor Air Quality). What indoor pollutants are we worried about? Particles from industrial pollution and wildfires and gases like ozone that enter buildings from the outside as well as gases generated indoors like formaldehyde that come from paints, glues, furniture, cleaning supplies, and other things inside buildings.   

While particles from industrial pollution and wildfires can be controlled with particle filters (think the MERV filters at home or in your office building), most buildings rely on outside air ventilation to dilute the indoor generated gaseous contaminants like formaldehyde. In fact, under most building codes today a typical office building replaces the full volume of indoor air with outside air ~20 times a day to ensure that indoor generated gaseous contaminants don’t reach unhealthy levels.  

The problem with this “dilution ventilation” approach is multifold. First, it requires larger and more expensive HVAC systems to move and condition more outside air ventilation. This is especially true in climates with hot and humid summers and/or cold winters. Second, these larger HVAC systems use more energy to condition all this outside air, and more energy use means higher operating costs and more carbon emissions from our buildings, which accelerates climate change. There is also the question of what to do when the outside air is polluted. Using polluted outside air to “clean” indoor air doesn’t make a lot of sense and should be a consideration year-round, not just during “wildfire season”.  

All these problems can be addressed by using sorbent filters to remove the indoor generated gaseous contaminants directly from indoor air so that the already conditioned air in our buildings can be safely reused. This is what spaceships and submarines have done for decades out of necessity (it is really hard to bring in outside air in space and underwater!), and this is what enVerid’s version of the technologies used by NASA and the Navy enables in commercial buildings. The technology is called Sorbent Ventilation Technology^® and it uses specially developed sorbent media filters to remove all the “contaminants of concern” as defined by ASHRAE, the leading buildings standards organization, from indoor air so that building owners and operators can install smaller, less expensive HVAC systems, reduce ventilation energy use (the #2 energy use in commercial buildings!) and associated carbon emissions, and improve indoor air quality by making our buildings more resilient to polluted outside air year round.  

As former ASHRAE President William Bahnfleth recently stated, “To create high-IAQ, low-energy, climate resilient buildings for the future, we need to embrace alternatives to outside air ventilation to maintain healthy indoor environments.” 

We couldn’t agree more.  

To learn more about how Sorbent Ventilation Technology can make your building a high-IAQ, low-energy, climate resilient building, click here or send me a message so we can discuss further.