Inverse Identification of Multiple Pollutant Sources

In case of an accidental release of indoor airborne pollutants, it is critical to know information of the pollutant sources. Current inverse modeling concentrates on identifying a single pollutant source or multiple pollutant sources in simplified puff or constant release forms. This investigation proposes an inverse model to precisely identify the multiple pollutant source number, locations and their temporal release rate profiles simultaneously. The model implements Tikhonov-based inverse matrix operation to obtain the release rate profiles for each candidate source with temporal concentrations provided by sensors. A candidate source with a solved release rate close to zero is excluded as an active source, and then the pollutant source number and locations with nonzero release rate can be determined. The above strategy was applied to identify two sources released by passengers in a three-dimensional aircraft cabin. The results show that the proposed method is able to determine the source number, locations and their temporal rate profiles correctly.