Ventilation efficiency as a means of characterizing air distribution in a building for indoor air quality evaluation.

Air change rate is often reported as a single number, with no attention paid to different values of air change rate in different zones of a building. This may affect air quality evaluation as there may be undetected zones where air change rate is too small, resulting in localized pollutant concentrations. Describes a multi-point tracer gas technique used to quantify air change ratein different zones of various residential buildings. Defines and calculates zonal ventilation efficiency terms, and proposes a criterion for analysis of the results for indoor air quality evaluation.