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The Controlled Active Ventilation Environment (CAVE) laboratory specialises in creating and maintaining resilient buildings and indoor environments.
About us
Welcome to the Controlled Active Ventilation Environment (CAVE) laboratory! CAVE is a unique large scale air quality and ventilation lab for applied and fundamental science and engineering studies.
At CAVE we create fully monitored and full-scale "living labs" for testing. We use the main laboratory space to simulate realistic external urban environments, and then construct full-scale buildings within the space to simulate realistic indoor environments.
Our Mission
Our mission at the CAVE laboratory is to provide a carefully controlled test facility to develop the knowledge base on how real occupied indoor environments perform when they are subject to internal and external challenges. We study how ventilation technologies, indoor and outdoor air pollution can impact on indoor air quality, in the context of sustainable building design.
We believe in rigorous testing grounded in science and engineering, and in co-production of knowledge and know-how across disciplinary and professional boundaries. We are committed to disseminating our findings through data sharing and wider collaborations, and to facilitate and promote collaboration in our field between academia, industry, professional institutions, government and communities.
Addressing Challenges
We aim to be part of the solution, and our research focuses on how to make indoor environments safer, healthier and more resilient for urban residents who increasingly spend most of their time in indoor settings.
The built environment is subject to unprecedented stressors in the 21st century. Buildings have to perform to conflicting demands to keep occupants healthy, productive, comfortable and safe, whilst delivering on key environmental, energy and sustainability targets at low cost. Through our work in CAVE, we can address these problems holistically in collaboration with our partners. We can help them navigate these challenges and develop cost-effective solutions that work for people and planet.
Our Research
Controlled Active Ventilation Environment (CAVE) laboratory can be used to:
- Simulate indoor environments such as office buildings or schools to test ventilation technologies for a wide range of climate conditions.
- Simulate exterior urban environments such as street canyons, to study building elements and facades, green infrastructure, pedestrian comfort and pollution dispersion.
- Simulate air quality hazards to improve understanding of indoor-outdoor exchange and promote solutions for healthy buildings.
Research Workflow and Capabilities
Our Projects
PROJECTS WILL BE ADDED SOON.
Inside the CAVE Facility
CAVE is a complex climate-controlled and ventilation-controlled indoor laboratory. With a plan area 206m2 and height 9m. CAVE’s large state-of-the-art facility will house a variety of fully monitored and full-scale "living labs" for testing. These can range from small buildings to vehicles to double-decker buses, and can involve complex building elements and facades.
Our laboratory HVAC systems enable the creation of completely independent "interior" and "exterior" environments, reproducing a wide range of separate climate and air quality scenarios for each. The climate capabilities range between -5°C to 43°C in the “exterior” environment and 10°C to 28°C in the “interior”, and both environments can be supplied with fresh or recirculated air or artificially generated pollutants.
These environments are monitored at high resolution for a variety of climate variables (Temperature, humidity, and airflows) and of typical indoor and outdoor pollutants (such as CO2, VOCs, Particulate matter, NOx, etc).
Our experimental results are used to validate realistic and complex computational models related to urban fluid mechanics, Indoor Air Quality (IAQ), outdoor Air Pollution, indoor microbiomes, and thermal comfort.
The large scale CAVE laboratory also enables us to conduct experiments with dozens of human participants in "living labs". This will help us understand the impact of indoor building environments on the people who occupy them, and to develop strategies for infection resilience in buildings and cities.
On Press and Media
- Studying airborne Covid-19 transmission at the FA Cup Final (14 May 2021)
A study to help get large-scale events back up and running will be collecting and analysing data from test events in London, including this weekend’s FA Cup Final and the BRIT Awards.
Read here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/may/studying-airborne-covid-19-transmiss...
- Fresh air key to safeguarding waste collection vehicle crews from COVID-19 (11 March 2021)
Keeping the cab of waste collection vehicles well ventilated and with a constant supply of fresh air is key to protecting drivers from COVID-19 transmission, finds a report from UCL researchers.
Read here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/mar/fresh-air-key-safeguarding-waste-col...
- Covering screen gaps minimises Covid-19 risk for bus drivers (29 October 2020)
Covering up gaps around the screen separating bus drivers from passengers is an effective way to reduce Covid-19 transmission risk for drivers while they are in their cabin, according to a study by UCL researchers commissioned by Transport for London.
Read here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/oct/covering-screen-gaps-minimises-covid...