Inside the main CAVE laboratory. Image © Liora Malki-Epshtein
Construction of UCL’s Controlled Active Ventilation Environment (CAVE) laboratory, designed to research climate and airborne hazards, has been completed and will be officially launched early in 2024.
CAVE is the first facility of its kind in terms of its advanced capabilities to carry out research at full scale into air quality and ventilation challenges in buildings. It is designed to answer questions relating to indoor air in urban environments, such as the effects of traffic pollution, infectious diseases or other airborne hazards, and how can indoor air be protected and improved.
It is a complex climate-controlled and ventilation-controlled space with an area of 206 square metres and a height of nine metres, which can be set up to mimic external environments with temperatures ranging from -5°C to over 40°C.
Fully monitored, full-scale ‘living labs’, such as two-storey modular buildings or large vehicles, can be constructed inside CAVE to facilitate experiments on the relationship between external environmental factors and indoor air quality in realistic conditions.
CAVE will place people and their health and wellbeing at the centre of research to explore how real indoor environments function when they are occupied, and how to make these spaces safer, healthier and more resilient to current and future challenges.
Associate Professor Liora Malki-Epshtein (UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering), Director of CAVE, said:
When the idea for CAVE emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, we quickly realised how little real world air quality data we have in all sorts of contexts, from keeping medical and public spaces clean and safe from infection transmission, to ventilating homes to reduce illness. Air quality is affected by everything that we build and has not received enough attention until, sadly, people lost their lives or were seriously at risk. The criteria that we’ve been using to evaluate ventilation efficiency and performance have been imprecise and inadequate up until now. I hope that the data that CAVE generates will have a positive impact on industry standards and contribute to a more joined-up approach to design.
One of the missions of CAVE will be to support the development of air quality and thermal comfort solutions that tackle climate change in a sustainable, equitable, healthy and socially beneficial manner. A key objective will be helping the UK to meet its environmental sustainability strategy objectives through research on clean air. CAVE will also support the UK innovation strategy in Energy and Environment Technologies, by advancing sustainable ways to reduce UK energy demand by 40% by 2050.
The £9.4 million CAVE project was designed by architects Perkins & Will and built by construction company VolkerFitzpatrick at the LondonEast-UK Business and Technical Park, Dagenham.
