Bjarne W. Olesen, Chandra Sekhar, Pawel Wargocki
Year:
2021
Bibliographic info:
AIVC VIP 42, 2021

Worldwide, there is an increasing number of publications related to air cleaning and sales of gas phase air cleaning products. This puts a demand for verifying the influence of using air cleaning on indoor air quality, comfort, well-being and health. It is thus important to learn whether air cleaning can supplement ventilation with respect to improving air quality i.e. whether it can partly substitute the ventilation rates required by standards.

International Standards for Ventilation (Indoor Air Quality) such as EN16798-1, ISO17772-1 and ASHRAE 62.1 are often based on criteria for the Perceived Air Quality (PAQ), sometimes expressed as levels of CO2 as a tracer for emission from occupants. However, if air cleaning is used, an equivalent level of air quality will be reached at higher CO2 concentrations. It is assumed that when ventilation is used for PAQ, the required ventilation will also dilute other contaminants like Radon and VOCs.

Today, gas phase air cleaners are tested based on a chemical measurement, which does not account for the influence on PAQ and human bio effluents as a source of pollution.

This report will discuss and evaluate the pros and cons by partly substituting required ventilation by gas phase air cleaning.