Performance of personalized ventilation in a room with an underfloor air distribution system: transport of contaminants between occupants

Studies have documented that personalized ventilation, which provides clean air at each officeworkplace, is able to improve substantially the quality of air inhaled by occupants. However,the interaction between the airflow generated by personalized ventilation and the airflowpattern outside the workplaces has not been studied in detail. This paper presents a study onthe performance of a personalized ventilation system installed in a full-scale test room with anunderfloor air distribution system. Transport of human-produced airborne pollutants (in reallife they can be infectious agents) between two occupants was examined using a tracer gas.Two breathing thermal manikins were used to simulate occupants. The results show that thetested combination of personalized and underfloor ventilation was not able to decrease theconcentration of the human-produced airborne pollutants in air inhaled by the exposedmanikin. The main conclusion is that the design of the personalized ventilation system and theinteraction of personalized airflow and room airflow should be carefully considered in orderto achieve minimal transport of pollution between occupants.