A new approach for the numerical identification of interzonal airflows from tracer gas measurements.

This paper presents a new approach to determine the interzonal airflows of a multizone system using tracer gas measurements. In contrast to methods proposed earlier, the presented method does not use the mass balance as basis for the least squares problem but identifies the interzonal airflows as coefficients of the evolution equations for the concentrations. Therefore estimating the derivatives with respect to the time from measured data is avoided. Furthermore the concentration can be calculated at arbitrary points in time. In addition, if exact intervals bounding the sampling error are available, interval arithmetic can be used to determine bounds for the interzonal airflows.