indoor environment

Efforts to save energy may easily lead to the compromisation of indoor environmental conditions and vice-versa. This study suggests an indicator for indoor environmental quality classification, developed with the purpose of assisting households that are trying to save energy, to maintain optimum levels of indoor environmental quality during this effort. The “Dwelling Environmental Quality Index” (DEQI) is a comprehensive indoor environmental quality indicator, reported to occupants as an easily understood number (percentage).

BR10 requires that all new residential constructions should be built as low energy housing. In order to meet these requirements residential buildings must be equipped with far more complex technology, than conventional housing. This, for example, could be a combination of mechanical balanced ventilation, natural ventilation, heat pumps, solar heating, solar cells or automatic sunscreens.

Today an acceptable indoor air quality is mainly defined by specifying the required level of ventilation in air changes per hour or the outside air supply rate. This would be equivalent to defining the requirements for thermal comfort by specifying the level of heating or cooling in Watts. The increasing societal need for energy efficiency will often result in very tight buildings. This means that the amount of outside air supplied by infiltration is not enough to provide the required ventilation.

The overarching objective of this study was to develop a numerical model based on computational fluid dynamics to predict aerosol concentration distributions in indoor environments. Towards this end, this paper proposes a wall surface deposition model of nano-scale aerosol that can predict unsteady deposition flux of aerosol indoors; it also reports the results of sensitivity analyses for targeting a plug-flow-type chamber.

A mathematical model that reproduces fungal proliferation and morphological colony formation was developed on the basis of a reaction diffusion modeling approach. In this modeling, fungus was separated into two states, active and inactive, and it was assumed that active fungus moves by diffusion and reaction while generating and producing inactive fungus. The effects of temperature and humidity on fungal growth were explicitly incorporated in the reaction term of nutrient consumption/generation of active fungus in this governing equation.

The use of CFD technique for predicting the properties of airflow fields and particle movement is effective to carry out parametric study intended for a wide range of particle sizes. In this study, particle dispersions due to turbulent flow and thermophoretic effect were analyzed for a simplified ventilator model. Numerical results that comprise a classification of particle motion, temperature difference and particle diameter were reported.

The National Museum of Western Art is the only work of Le Corbusier in Japan and 50 years have already passed since its construction. In order to maintain the museum’s value as a cultural asset, there is an urgent need to draft a thorough retrofit plan both to maintain the building’s function as an art museum and to restore Le Corbusier’s original design concept.

This study presents an optimization method of sensor layout to improve identification accuracy of indoor contaminant sources. The method integrates an index, the performance of sensor layout (PSL), with a two-step screening procedure to determine sensor layouts that have potential to achieve relatively high levels of accuracy in source identification. Using the PSL, the performance of each possible sensor layout can be predicted and evaluated, and therefore the optimization method can be performed without running a source identification model.

It is not unusual to face moisture problems in buildings in cold climates and wet regions. It is, however, unusual to have the same problem in a relatively dry region such as Jordon, which has moderate weather conditions and mild winters. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of houses and residential apartments in Jordan are affected. The monitoring of inside air conditions, wall surface temperatures, ventilation and living style has shown that a high relative humidity (RH >75%) occurs at walls resulting in possible condensation.

The incidence of asthma and allergy has increased throughout the developed world over the past 30-50years, roughly the same time period that exposure to phthalates has increased. An ongoing study inSweden, Damp Buildings and Health, showed associations between asthma anddi(2-ethyl-hexyl)-phthalate concentration in dust and between eczema and rhinitis andbutylbenzyl-phthalate.