Indoor Air Quality, indoor air pollution

There are many sources of indoor air pollution in any "room", residential, commercial, or industrial.

Sources of industrial (indoor) air pollution that are nor vented through a chimney or stack immediately and completely into the environment include mainly "fugitive" sources. Typical examples include such activities as stripping and painting, and the use of solvents, resins and industrial chemicals, cutting, grinding and polishing, welding, any internal use of open fire outside well vented boilers, but also car exhaust from loading docks.

For residential buildings, but also commercial spaces, offices, warehouses and public buildings, these include

• combustion sources such as oil, gas, kerosene, coal, wood, (e.g., heating and cooking) and tobacco products;
• building materials and furnishings as diverse as deteriorated, asbestos-containing insulation, wet or damp carpet, and cabinetry or furniture made of certain pressed wood products;
• products for household cleaning and maintenance, personal care, or hobbies; central heating and cooling systems and humidification devices;
• outdoor sources such as radon, pesticides,
• outdoor air pollution.

Indoor air quality modeling
AirWare integrates a model to predict levels of indoor air pollution, both due to internal sources and due to the exchange with outdoor air pollution, estimated by the AirWare emission and dispersion models.

The model is organized around building objects, and model scenarios (real-time now-casts and forecasts, basic scenario analysis for episodes, long-term scenarios for impact assessment).

Building object have a name, type and location, as well as georeferenced geometry. They have a basic size (area covered, total floor space, (average) floor (net) height, and a resulting internal volume. Control parameters include the ventilation rate (air exchange in m3/s) and a filter efficiency for their air intake, if any.

The internal emissions include "classical" pollutants such as SO2, NO/NO2/NOx, particulates, CO and VOc; and more specific "indoor pollutants" such as radon, formaldehyde, benzene, naphtalene, tri/tetrachloroethylene.

There is also a hypertext description and optional imagery, links to documents such as descriptions, permits, building plans and drawings; a contact address of the owner/operator, and a link to GoogleMaps to explore the location beyond the basic map that shows the location of the building.

A button: Indoor triggers the indoor model proper.

This can operate in two distinct modes:

1. Triggered from the object data base level, as a stand-alone version, one building at a time, to evaluate different scenarios of emissions, outdoor air quality levels, and air exchange, over user defined period, with user-defined dynamic parameters, or as a steady-state solution. Control variables include the emission rates, outdoor background pollution levels, air exchange rate, filter efficiency for gases and particulates, model duration. The temporal variation in emission, ventialtion, background air polluation levels and internal contaminant levels are summarized in a series of graphs under interactive user control.
2. Integrated with an air quality model scenario and the associated model domain; given the building position, the air quality background concentrations computed at the surrounding model grid cells are used to calculate air echange/dispersion, and the consequent indoor concentrations over time.

For the stand-alone case, the model interface offer all scenario parameters for editing, re-runs the model upon change, updated the tabular summary of indoor air quality by substance, and color code the image of the building for one user defined substance at a time. This allows a fast experimentation with different setting of background and emissions, the ventilation rate, and intake filter efficiency, which can be integrated in an optimization framework to meet indoor air quality standards at minimal cost.