On 9-10 October 2024, the AIVC – TightVent – venticool 2024 joint Conference “Retrofitting the Building Stock: Challenges and Opportunities for Indoor Environmental Quality”, was organised by the International Network on Ventilation and Energy Performance (INIVE) on behalf of the Air Infiltration and Ventilation Centre (AIVC), the Building and Ductwork Airtightness Platform (TightVent Europe) and the international platform for ventilative cooling (venticool). The University of Galway, the Maynooth University and the Sustainable Energy Authority Of Ireland (SEAI) were also key organisers. This successful event brought together over 180 participants, including researchers, engineers, architects, policymakers, manufacturers, stakeholders, and international organizations from 26 countries.

The conference programme featured three parallel tracks with approximately 150 presentations across the key themes of Smart Ventilation, Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and Health, Building & Ductwork Airtightness, and Ventilative and Resilient Cooling. A special session of “90-Second Industry Presentations”, was organised to disseminate exclusive information from the event’s sponsors to the conference participants, in addition to the conference exhibition.

The “Resilient Ventilative Cooling” track at the conference was organised in 7 sessions, 4 of which were topical sessions with a number of invited presentations:

1. Topical Session: Ventilative Cooling – latest and greatest. Importance of early design in the world of overheating mitigation using ventilative cooling
2. Climate change resilience
3. Topical Session: Resilient Indoor Thermal Environments: Findings & Future Policy from an Irish National Study on Non-Residential Buildings
4. Natural ventilation & cooling
5. Topical Session: ReCOver++: Improving resilience of buildings to overheating
6. Topical Session: State of the art of Personalized Environmental Control Systems (PECS)
7. Natural Ventilation analysis

This article available here offers an overview of the main trends, ideas, and insights shared over the two-day conference, focusing particularly on resilient ventilative cooling. The article is structured into four main themes:

1. Ventilative cooling & resilient cooling design
2. Thermal resilience assessment
3. Natural ventilation
4. Personal Environmental Control Systems

Hilde Breesch (KU Leuven, Belgium) delivering a summary of the Resilient Ventilative Cooling track, during the Closing Session at the AIVC 2024 Conference in Dublin