NEW DELHI : In light of the events of the past 18 months, schools as people know them have to be re-imagined – the children have suffered from lack of a routine, a continuity, socialisation, physical play and more. The solutions need to ensure that future school closures are avoided. India has seen severe outbreaks of communicable diseases and continues to have high air pollution rates. The team at Nirvana being, a premier Clean Air Tech business was tasked with presenting a green, sustainable and cost-effective solution that could be executed in 4-6 weeks ahead of the peak air pollution season.
The problem statement was presented by Shefali Varma, the chairperson of Ardee Schools, “Everything has changed, school designs of yester years don’t work in today’s environment. Large sprawling campuses with open corridors are hazardous to our children’s health. Like everything must keep changing according to environment, the way school buildings are designed, will have to be reimagined if we want to mitigate infections, pollution and CO2 levels. Smaller compact structures, intelligent, ventilated, healthy buildings are the future of education.”
The only way to achieve infection control and reduce exposure to air pollution was to create a microenvironment – and Nirvana Being and Ardee Schools decided to dome the entire school and create an indoor play area.
So, Nirvana Being domed the school to create a micro-environment where mechanical engineering is used to pump filtered ambient air into the central atrium, thus creating a positive pressure on the entire school, designed for 2-3 air changes every hour. Due to the positive pressure, only filtered air leaves the dome, no polluted air is able to enter. Through this solution, 3 big objectives were achieved:
Reduce exposure of the Ardee community to air pollution
Dramatically reduce transmission risk of COVID and other communicable diseases
Through the additional oxygen supply, improve the cognitive function and academic performance of the children.
All of this is backed by real-time air quality monitoring on all the floors of the school and TV screens displaying the indoor vs. outdoor to all the habitants under the dome. The entire solution has been designed using green and sustainable tech, so achieve a really low energy footprint while ensuring health and safety of the school community.
Jai Dhar Gupta, the Founder of Nirvana Being says, “Have to applaud the team at Ardee for their thought leadership. The work being done by us at Ardee School will provide a model to schools around the World, on health and safety measures to not only bring children back safely, but also avoid future school closures. Like I always say, you can only beat science, with science!”
Until the world gets a grip on the bigger issues of Climate Change and other public health risks, which may frankly require years, or maybe even decades, one needs to re-imagine and re-engineer the educational institutions to drive health and safety.
