tracer gas

More than two months of detailed test data have been gathered using modified constant concentration tracer gas techniques for a six-storey, 60 apartment, multi-family building. Weather, and interior conditions in the building were part of the data set. Because of occupant effects, large changes in air exchange rates were observed, often over short time period. The test apartment allowed us to evaluate the influences of weather alone with the added feature to employ controlled window openings.

Measurement methods based upon multiple tracer gas techniques have become an established branch of the study of air infiltration and interzonal air movements. Three general groups of techniques have emerged, namely constant concentration, constant emission, and decay. Of the decay type group of techniques, several methods of deriving airflows from measured concentration/time curves have been suggested.

Ventilation in a building enables to renew the air it contains by means of a natural exchange of air (depending on weather conditions and climate) or a forced exchange using mechanical appliances. This exchange of air must range between minimum air purity and maximum economical limit of dispersion (ventilating means cooling) without causing currents of air, unbearable for the people in the room, which would worsen thermal comfort.

During the past decade a multitude of diagnostic procedures associated with the evaluation of air infiltration and air leakage sites have been developed. The spirit of international cooperation and exchange of ideas within the AIC-AIVC conferences has greatly facilitated the adoption and use of these measurement techniques in the countries participating in Annex V. But wide application of such diagnostic methods are not limited to air infiltration alone.

The use of passive perfluorocarbon technique for air flow measurements has been developed and tested. The building and testing of the system took approximately one year. The reproducibility of the analysis was tested during the period. The results show that the relative standard deviation of the analysis for parallel samples is less than 7 % for each tracer in most of the cases. A drift of calibration was noticed, but it can be allowed for by using reference samples with known amounts of tracers. The accuracy of the method was tested in controlled laboratory conditions.

This paper presents and evaluates a new method, based upon tracer gas techniques, for determining interzonal airflows and effective volumes in a multizone enclosure. Presently used tracer gas techniques have a number of drawbacks including the need for multiple tracers when analyzing a multizone structure. Also, traditional techniques cannot be used to independently determine flows and volumes in the multizone case. The method described in this paper eliminates some of the problems introduced by multiple tracers and allows the independent determination of both flows and volumes.

1979 a project was launched at Technological Institute, Copenhagen with the purpose of developing a method for continuous measurement of air change rates in occupied dwellings. Today - 10 years later - we can introduce the first generation of mass-produced measuring equipment performing measurements of air change rates employing the method of constant concentration of tracer gas. The principles used in the first model, which was introduced 1981, are largely identical to those used in the latest model.

A comparison of three injection manners, step-up, step-down and pulse, for determination of the mean age of air was made by using nitrous oxide and sulphur hexafluoride as tracer gases. The concentrations of nitrous oxide and sulfur hexafluoride were simultaneously measured with a dual-channel IR-analyzer. Tests were carried out in a test chamber with air change rates of 3 h-1 and 5 h-1. The tracer gases were injected under three conditions: into the inlet air and directly into the room with and without extra mixing fans.