Please join the the IBPSA-USA Wisconsin Chapter for their online quarter 2 event as their technical association will take on the current event of COVID-19 (Novel Coronavirus) as it relates to transmission, prevention, HVAC design, and building performance. The chapter welcomed two experts in the industry to discuss the topic.

Talk #1 – The first half of the talk will provide general background knowledge including terminology, data, and assumptions to provide an infection prevention foundation. The second half of the talk will focus on how building performance modeling might make a positive impact on infection prevention in the future for airborne pathogens.

Speaker #1 Bio

Fred Betz, Ph.D is a senior member of Affiliated Engineers Inc.’s Buildings Performance Practice team and provides expertise in advanced building systems integration, energy simulation, renewable energy and power generation, and controls and diagnostics to many of the most technically complex and energy-intensive building projects in the US and abroad, including hospitals, research and development facilities, and campus-scale infrastructure initiatives. Fred reviewed scientific and medical literature as co-principal investigator of the recently published Academic Research to Support Facility Guidelines Institute & ANSI/ASHRAE/ASHE Standard 170, and is co-principal investigator on the ASHRAE Research Project “Literature Review for Evidence of the Basis for Specified Air Change Rates (ACR) for Cleanrooms, Laboratories, Laboratory Animal Facilities, and Health Care Facilities with Medium to High ACR. Fred frequently presents at conferences and guest lectures at several universities in the United States.

Talk #2 – Professor Peng Xu, Ph.D of Tongji University in China will talk about current understandings of the coronavirus transmission mechanism, and the implications on HVAC design and operation, along with case studies of the design-build-operate of China’s Lei Shen Shan and Huo Shen Shan makeshift hospitals. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/02/801537445/photos-china-builds-a-medical-center-from-scratch-in-under-2-weeks

Speaker #2 Bio

Peng Xu has many years of experience in sustainable building analysis, low carbon urban planning, building commissioning and retrofitting, innovative building controls and performance monitoring, fault detection and diagnosis, and energy simulation. He is a professor at College of Mechanical Engineering, Tongji University. He also serves as the acting director of Tongji-XinAo Renewable Energy Research Institute. Before he came back to China, Dr. Xu worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL) for 9 years. In 2008, he received an Outstanding Performance Reward from LBNL due to his contribution on greening the US Capitol and developing a sustainable zero-carbon pathway. Dr. Xu is a licensed professional engineer in thermal and fluid dynamics. He was the chairman of Smart Building System Technical Committee of ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers) and a voting member of Technical Committees 7.4 and 7.5 of ASHRAE. He received his Ph.D. in civil engineering in 2000 from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MBA from Haas Business School at UC Berkeley.