Emissions from Building Materials: Simulation of the Indoor Air Quality

The emission from materials is an important source of degradation of our indoor air quality. Toinvestigate this field, it is necessary to determine pollutant concentration inside buildings, based onemission rates and air exchange rate (ventilation + envelope airtightness). This paper presentsdifferent method for such determination and their application to the case of formaldehyde from building materials. The simplest method, using simplified emission rates and simplified air exchange rates is only appropriate for a first screening to obtain order of magnitudes for pollutant concentrations, while more complex methods, using static or dynamic simulations of building air flows are powerful techniques to investigate in more details the effect of the emissions (rates, material distribution, etc) as well as ventilation system (type, flow rate).