ASHRAE Journal - October 2019 - 76

COLUMN IEQ APPLICATIONS
William P. Bahnﬂeth

IAQ 2020 Conference Preview

IEQ
QP
Performance
Approaches
BY WILLIAM P. BAHNFLETH, PH.D., P.E., PRESIDENTIAL MEMBER/FELLOW ASHRAE

The 19th ASHRAE IAQ conference will convene in Athens, Greece, September 14 - 16,
2020. IAQ 2020, like its predecessor IAQ 2016, will serve as the conference of the Air
Inﬁltration and Ventilation Centre (AIVC). Since its inception in 1986, it has been
customary for the IAQ conference to highlight an IAQ-related topic of current interest. The 2016 conference emphasized deﬁnitions of air quality, which are needed
to enable controls based directly on contaminant exposures.1,2 The theme of IAQ
2020 is "Indoor Environmental Quality Performance Approaches" with the subtitle
"Transitioning from IAQ to IEQ." This article presents the rationale for this choice and
what it is hoped the conference will accomplish.
While there is no consensus deﬁnition of the term,
"performance-based IAQ," it suggests a basis in outcomes like productivity, health, and incidence of
disease. This requires consideration of relevant
exposures and knowledge of exposure-response relationships. The discussions of IAQ deﬁnitions at IAQ
2016-what should be measured and how should it be
assessed-feed directly into the theme of IAQ 2020.
Consideration of these important questions may contribute to the improvement of the Indoor Air Quality
Procedure (IAQP) in ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 62.1-2016,
Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Quality. The IAQP is a
performance-based method in the sense of limiting
speciﬁc contaminant exposures although its objective,
like that of the Ventilation Rate Procedure is to achieve
a desired level of acceptability and absence of known
contaminants at hazardous levels. At the opening session of the 2016 conference, 45% of participants voted
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that performance metrics for IAQ could be developed
from existing science. At the closing, after two days of
presentations and discussions, that ﬁgure fell to 13%
with 30% expressing the opinion that practical performance-based IAQ was at least 10 years into the future.
This strongly suggests the need to focus on knowledge
gaps related to performance based IAQ in IAQ 2020 that
must be addressed to move beyond a perceived air quality approach.
The second key issue embedded in the conference
theme is the need for a more comprehensive and integrated approach to the indoor environment based on
overall Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ)-a transition
from viewing each parameter (air quality, thermal environment, light, and sound) in isolation to assessing their
William P. Bahnﬂeth, Ph.D., P.E., is professor of architectural engineering and director of the
Indoor Environment Center at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa. He chaired
the steering committee for IAQ 2016.

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ASHRAE Journal - October 2019

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