Carbon dioxide produced by occupants can be used as a natural tracer gas for analysing air change rates in dwellings. However, a high level of concentration uniformity is necessary for tracer gas measurements. Therefore, mixing fans are usually used. The use of such fans in occupied homes is not convenient, thus the uniformity requirement may not be fulfilled. Experiments in climate chambers were carried out to simulate the distribution of CO2 under different controlled conditions, without additional mixing. Sufficient concentration uniformity was observed in all measured cases.
Carbon dioxide exhaled by people can be used as a tracer gas for air change measurements in homes. Good mixing of tracer gas with room air is a necessary condition to obtain accurate results. However, the use of fans in dwellings to ensure mixing is inconvenient. The natural room distribution of metabolic CO2 was simulated in laboratory experiments and verified in a field study. The results of the field measurements presented in this paper support the findings of the laboratory study, i.e. that CO2 is well mixed into the room air even though fans were not used.
Today, tracer gas is used as a reliable means to examine various queries related to mechanical systems. Prerequisite is the safe and routine handling of the relevant analysis methods. Apart from some basic considerations, the present paper includes results of ventilation efficiency studies and a comparison of different systems on the basis of characteristic parameters.
Tracer gases are often used to assess airflow rates in air handling units. Published methods aremostly designed for units with recirculation ratios lower than those commonly found inSingapore and other tropical countries. Large recirculation ratio homogenize theconcentrations, so that concentrations in supply and extract ducts are close to each other. Inaddition, such units often present a large time constant, so the time needed to reachequilibrium is very large. A procedure for tracer gas dilution technique adapted to such airhandlingunits is presented.
Tracer gas sorption in and permeation through building materials influence tracer gas ventilationmeasurements. Therefore, it is important to have knowledge about these processes.The permeation of three commonly used tracers (SF6, N2O and the PFT C6F6) through untreatedgypsum board has been experimentally investigated. The result shows that all three tracers diffusereadily through this material (diffusion coefficients in the order of 1 10.-6 m2/s). Caution shouldtherefore be exercised when using tracer gas measurements in rooms with walls of gypsum boardor other porous materials.
The purpose of this study is to estimate the accuracy of the Supply Rate Fulfilment (SRF)value measured by using tracer gas on a test house. The SRF is intended to evaluate quantityindex and is defined as the ratio of the effective supply rate to the substantial required freshair supply rate. The procedures to measure the SRF value with use of tracer gas techniques,which are constant concentration method and constant injection method, were shown. TheSRF values of the each room in the test house were measured.
In the present paper, the influence of the initial inclination angle of the jet on the efficiency ofa vertical downward air curtain is analysed. The air curtain device was mounted over anoverture, in the wall between two equal contiguous rooms, with the typical dimensions of adoor.
Single- and double-section manufactured homes were instrumented in 2001-2003 to measure continuous energy usage and air infiltration with respect to the environmental conditions of a windy cold dry climate. The test site near Arlington, Wyoming, USA is ideal for testing the energy (and structural) performance of manufactured housing due to the naturally occurring high winds (in excess of 35 m/s annually) and temperature extremes (+35 to -35C). Tests included tracer gas monitoring, pressurized leakage tests, and infrared (IR) video scans.
To provide additional validation data for the multizone airflow and contaminant model, CONTAMW, experiments were performed in an occupied 3-story townhouse in Reston, VA. A tracer gas, sulfur hexaflouride (SF6), was manually injected within one room of the house and the concentration of SF6 was measured in each zone. This same process was then recreated in CONTAMW and the resulting predictions were statistically compared to the measured values. A total of 10 experiments were conducted and simulated between May 2000 and June 2001.
This paper describes a new tool, ils architecture and its predictive performance. BACH is a computational tool for air flow simulation in and around buildings in the early stages of the design process.
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