Demand specifying variables and current ventilation rate requirements with respect to the future use of VOC sensing for DCV control

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. Building itself as well as its furnishing and equipment together with different human activities happening in them, are significant sources of different chemicals that may aggravate comfort and in some cases even negatively affect the health of the occupants. That is why emissions of those compounds should be also taken into account in the ventilation control. Recent development in gas sensing technology resulted in a new generation of relatively cheap and practically applicable sensors that can offer measurements of some of the pollutants mentioned above – mainly Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC). This seems to bring a new dimension into the control of DCV systems. This paper is a contribution to the workshop on utilization of VOC sensing technology used for DCV control. The aim of the paper is to provide a short review of different types of demand variables used to control DCV systems and summarize ventilation rate requirements contained in current standards and guidelines with respect to the future potential of VOC sensing.