Future Ready HVAC Webinar Recording

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a focus on how owners and their designers look at HVAC, including designing for indoor comfort, energy efficiency, and potential reduction of the risk of negative health outcomes with infectious diseases. The video below presents an overview of some of the history of HVAC design and more recent studies that indicate how HVAC systems could help reduce the risks associated with infectious diseases.  

The video provides possible ideas, starting with historical HVAC design and how that design could be modified with novel HVAC design concepts for a wide range of facilities and vehicles.  WSP has a number of engineers with extensive experience designing HVAC systems for hospitals and infectious disease laboratories.  The video takes that experience and discusses how it could be applied to other indoor facilities in the transportation, hospitality, entertainment, and workplace sectors, and how owners could do so while possibly mitigating structural changes in those existing facilities. In the future, it is likely that designers in different disciplines will work more closely together to optimize facility design for form and function, where health becomes a greater focus in design criteria.

This presentation represents the beginning of an ongoing, multi-industry dialogue focused on more than ventilation and filtration, but also considers the importance of airflow patterns in indoor spaces. Engineering studies, such as those based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling can help simulate and visualize how new HVAC design alternatives could  improve HVAC performance in any given space while giving designers additional information to help them address impacts from potential infectious diseases in those spaces. Contact one of our specialists below for further information.