Assessment of ventilation rates inside educational buildings in Southwestern Europe: Analysis of implemented strategic measures Aguilar Aguilera, Antonio Jesús De la Hoz Torres, María Luisa Martínez Aires, María Dolores Ruiz Padillo, Diego Pablo Buildings Ventilation assessment Safety management Indoor environmental quality Well-being Antonio J. Aguilar Aguilera and Maria Luisa de la Hoz Torres wish to thank the support of the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovaci ' on y Universidades of Spain under an FPU grant. This work has been supported by the Consejo General de la Arquitectura T ' ecnica (CGATE), the "Junta de Andalucia" (Spain) under project B-TEP-362-UGR18 and the State Research Agency (SRA) of Spain and European Regional Development Funds (ERDF) under project PID2019-108761RB-I00. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada/CBUA. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has highlighted the need to ensure good indoor air quality. Public buildings (educational buildings in particular) have come under the spotlight because students, teachers and staff spend long periods of the day indoors. This study presents a measurement campaign for the assessment of ventilation rate (VR) and ventilation strategies in educational buildings in Southwestern Europe, Portugal and Spain. A representative sample of the teaching spaces of the Azur´em Campus (Guimar˜aes, Portugal) and the Fuentenueva Campus (Granada, Spain) have been analyzed. Natural ventilation is the predominant ventilation strategy in these spaces, being the most common strategy in educational buildings in Europe. VR was estimated under different configurations, using the CO2 decay method. Subsequently, the CO2 concentration was estimated according to occupancy and the probability of infection risk was calculated using the Wells-Riley equation. The obtained VR varied between 2.9 and 20.1 air change per hour (ACH) for natural cross ventilation, 2.0 to 5.1 ACH for single-sided ventilation and 1.8 to 3.5 for mechanically ventilated classrooms. Large differences in CO2 concentrations were verified, depending on the analyzed ventilation strategy, ranging from 475 to 3903 ppm for the different scenarios. However, the probability of risk was less than 1% in almost all of the classrooms analyzed. The results obtained from the measurement campaign showed that the selection of an appropriate ventilation strategy can provide sufficient air renewal and maintain a low risk of infection. Ventilation strategies need to be reconsidered as a consequence of the health emergency arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. 2022-04-29T08:30:33Z 2022-04-29T08:30:33Z 2022-02-17 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Antonio J. Aguilar... [et al.]. Assessment of ventilation rates inside educational buildings in Southwestern Europe: Analysis of implemented strategic measures, Journal of Building Engineering, Volume 51, 2022, 104204, ISSN 2352-7102, [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2022.104204] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/74642 10.1016/j.jobe.2022.104204 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España Elsevier