THE EFFECT OF USING LOW-POLLUTING BUILDING MATERIALS ON VENTILATION REQUIREMENTS AND ENERGY USE IN BUILDINGS

The main objective of the ongoing research project described in this paper was to study the potential forreducing energy used for ventilating buildings by using low-polluting building materials, withoutcompromising the indoor air quality. To quantify this potential, the exposure-response relationships, i.e.the relationships between ventilation rate and perceived indoor air quality, were established for roomsfurnished with different categories of polluting materials and the simulations of energy used forventilation were carried out. The exposure-response relationships were based on a summary of datareported in the literature on exposure-response relationships for materials tested in laboratory settingsin small-scale glass chambers, and in full-scale in climate chambers, test rooms or normal offices. Newexperiments were also considered in which the effect of using low-polluting materials on perceived airquality was examined in test rooms ventilated with different outdoor air supply rates, low-pollutingmaterials being selected in small glass chambers. The results suggest that the exposure-responserelationships vary between different building materials and that the perceived air quality can beimproved considerably when polluting building materials are substituted with materials that pollute less.The preliminary energy simulations indicate that selecting low-polluting materials will result inconsiderable energy savings as a result of reducing the ventilation rates required to achieve acceptableindoor air quality.