Indoor Environment
Improving indoor environment quality in buildings with a human-centric approach.
Synergising expertise from diverse disciplines to facilitate built environments that deliver positive health, comfort, and performance benefits to building occupants.
Since we spend on average around 90% of our daily lives inside buildings, their indoor environment quality can significantly impact the health and wellbeing of their occupants. Indoor environment takes the lion’s share of building energy consumption, for example, 40% in HVAC and 25% in lighting. Thus, design strategies for sustainable buildings need to optimise the balance between energy efficiency on the one hand and indoor environmental quality on the other.
Our approach
Our approach is to leverage a wide range of nanotechnologies to deliver high quality occupant-centric building designs and strategies (indoor climate, illumination, acoustics, ventilation, and air quality). Our focus is on occupants’ comfort, health, performance and productivity, as well as energy sustainability and net-zero emission.
Buildings are for people and most of their energy demand relates to the thermal, ventilation, and illumination requirements of their occupants.
Research areas
- Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) sensing and analytics
- Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) surveys of occupants
- Building occupant behaviour and energy demand
- Thermal comfort, passive cooling and heating
- Indoor air quality and ventilation
- Healthy buildings and sick buildings
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The Indoor Environment cluster of the Smart Sustainable Building Network is actively working towards three of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):
- Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
- Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
- Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
Prof Richard de Dear, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Indoor environmental quality
Dr Alex Song, School of Electrical and Information Engineering
Dr Jing Xiong, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Indoor climate, comfort, and air quality
Dr Jungsoo Kim, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Indoor climate, comfort, and air quality
Dr Arianna Brambilla, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Indoor climate and energy
Dr Ozgur Gocer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Post-Occupancy Evaluation
Prof Ollie Jay, Faculty of Medicine and Health, Thermal ergonomics, heat and health
Prof Jun Huang, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
A/Prof Densil Cabrera, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Indoor acoustics
Dr Wenye Hu, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Lighting
Prof Daniel Tan, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Indoor plant production
Dr Zihuai Lin, School of Electrical & Information Engineering, Building occupant spatial coordinates
A/Prof Stefano Palomba, School of Physics, Novel sterilisation technique for improved indoor air quality
A/Prof Jin Ma, School of Electrical & Information Engineering
Richard de Dear
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+61 2 9351 3031
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Room 586 Wilkinson G04