Black stains in houses: soot, dust or ghosts?

Builders are never rnore surprised than when they walk into one of their newly built model homes and find black stains at wall-to-floor joints and on previously pristine carpeting underneath doorways. What causes these stains and how can builders and homeowners prevent them?

Ventilation control as a function of indoor and outdoor air quality.

The majority of urban pollution is traffic related and often shows daily variations with peaks occurring at rush hours. Poor outdoor air quality can affect the IAQ of local buildings that ventilate with polluted air. This is particularly applicable to buildings where AHU air intakes are at low level and adjacent to busy roads. The effect of pollution peaks can be minimized by ventilation control and this paper presents potential control techniques for periods when outdoor air quality is poor.

Exposure models for contaminant control decisions involving ventilation.

This paper discusses two complementary techniques for modeling human exposures to airborne contaminants with a focus on control decisions involving ventilation. Particular attention is given to: (I) the use of empirical-conceptual models with dimensional analysis and (2) computational fluid dynamic simulations. Both techniques provide valuable information. An empirical -conceptual model is formulated with dimensional analysis for a spray painting operation.

The new parliamentary building, Westminster.

Providing people with a quality indoor environment means full air conditioning with an energy use tag that we would rather not mention in the debate about environmental impact and sustainability. But is this really the case? Is it not possible to design mechanical systems so they use less energy than their naturally ventilated counterparts? The law of conservation of energy means we can use the same energy repeatedly. As long as we are aware of how energy is degraded in quality and temperature terms, we can design systems that repeatedly recover and reuse energy.

Pages