Controlled Active Ventilation Environment

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. 

CAVE is dedicated to providing a scientific experimental environment for testing technical solutions to improve building performance for people and the planet.

We believe in rigorous testing grounded in science and engineering, and in co-production of knowledge and know-how across disciplinary and professional boundaries. 

By committing to disseminating our findings through data sharing and wider collaborations, we facilitate and promote collaboration in our field between academia, industry, professional institutions, government and communities. 

Our carefully controlled test facility enables us to develop the knowledge base on how real occupied indoor environments perform when they are subject to internal and external challenges. 

Through this, we understand how ventilation technologies, indoor and outdoor air pollution can impact on indoor air quality, in the context of sustainable building design.

CAVE is a complex climate-controlled and ventilation-controlled indoor laboratory with a plan area 206m2 and height of 9m designed to house a variety of fully monitored and full-scale 'living labs' for testing.

We use the main laboratory space to simulate realistic external environments and then construct full-scale buildings, or place vehicles - such as double decker buses - within this and simulate realistic indoor environments. 

Operating at this scale enables us to conduct experiments with dozens of human participants to promote understanding of the impact of indoor building environments on the people who occupy them, and to develop strategies for infection resilience in buildings and cities. 

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. 

We can monitor these environments at high resolution for a variety of climate variables (temperature, humidity, and airflows) and typical indoor and outdoor pollutants (such as CO2, VOCs, particulate matter, NOx).

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.