MARIA: an experimental tool at the service of indoor air quality in housing sector

CSTB has built an experimental house MARIA: Mechanised house for Advanced Research on Indoor Air. The house is dedicated to study pollutants transfers, test ventilation systems, settle field investigation methods, and validate computational models. MARIA will be instrumented and automated according to pre-established scenario of operation reproducing parameters related to human presence and behaviour. The human presence is simulated with heat load and water vapour and pollutants emission. The operation of equipments such as doors and windows, domestic devices, will be automated. Indoor air quality parameters, meteorological parameters, outdoor pollutants and parameters related to house appliances will be measured. The control system of the house can manage both the measurement and automation systems. In this way, the experiments can be performed not only for pre-established scenario, but priority commands derived from measurements can be taken into account. Demand-controlled strategies based on measured environmental parameters can be studied.