PR2012

Accidental dispersion of toxic gas clouds may occur around industrial platforms or during hazardous materials transportation. In case of such a toxic risk, the best protection strategy is to remain inside a building and seek refuge in an airtight room identified as “shelter” until the toxic cloud has finally been swept off. This strategy called “passive shelter-in-place” also includes obstructing all external openings and turning off all mechanical ventilation systems

During the project QUAD-BBC, several ventilation systems have been studied in residential (individual house and collective dwellings) and non-residential (school, offices) and assessed by the evaluation of an IAQ multi-criteria.
These calculations have shown some typical evolution of pollutants in very tight low consumption buildings and can alert on some possible effects.

Building sealing may affect the total air change by decreasing the leakages and question the ability for ventilation systems to reach their goal of providing an acceptable indoor air quality. Improving energy performance must not impair indoor air quality.

Traditional architecture gives ideas to enrich modern architecture. In traditional architecture, local materials and renewable energy resources have been used. The courtyard was one of the traditional architecture solutions as a climate modifier. The inclusion of an internal courtyard in buildings design is attributed to the optimization of natural ventilation in order to minimize indoor overheating conditions.

LBNL Residential Diagnostics Database (ResDB) contains blower door measurements and other diagnostic test results of homes in United States. Of these, approximately 134,000 single-family detached homes have sufficient information for the analysis of air leakage in relation to a number of housing characteristics. We performed regression analysis to consider the correlation between normalized leakage and a number of explanatory variables: IECC climate zone, floor area, height, year built, foundation type, duct location, and other housing characteristics.

An emerging issue in Denmark is passive smoking in residential buildings where non-smokers are exposed to harmful smoke from their neighbours. There are various ways that smoke infiltrates from one flat to another. The air infiltration rate between two flats in a multi-storey building depends on its construction, tightness and age.

Demand Controlled Ventilation (DCV) is a well established principle to provide a certain indoor environmental quality, defined both in the terms of air quality and thermal comfort. This is accomplished by adjusting the supplied airflow rate according to a certain demand indicator, which conventionally has been the temperature or the CO2-concentration. When compared to schedule driven ventilation, application of DCV can lead to substantial energy savings. However, CO2 is the pollutant related to human occupancy and it does not provide any indication of so called building-related pollution.

The performance of ventilation and airtightness of the building envelope was studied in field measurements in recently constructed Estonian apartment buildings. The buildings were selected with different building envelopes and ventilation systems. The mean air leakage rate at the pressure difference of 50 Pa in the database was 1.7 m3/(h·m2). The mean air change rate at the pressure difference of 50 Pa from the database was 2.3 h-1.

The quality of the air that we breathe inside our homes, offices, schools and other public or private buildings is an important determinant of healthy life and people’s well being. Indoor air pollutants, either infiltrating from the outside or produced by indoor sources, are associated with a wide range of both acute and chronic health outcomes. These include respiratory symptoms, asthma, effects on the nervous system, cardio-vascular diseases and lung cancer

The paper summarizes the activites undertaken by AppliedSensor within the European Clear-up project with respect to new developments in volatile organic compound sensing for demand controlled ventilation. State-of-the-art is to use non-dispersive infrared sensor technology for indoor carbon dioxide detection. Carbon dioxide so far serves as indicator for bad indoor air quality and required ventilation rates.