This manual describes the computer program CONTAM version 3.2, developed by NIST. CONTAM is a multizone indoor air quality and ventilation analysis program designed to help determine airflows, contaminant concentrations, and personal exposure in buildings. Airflows include infiltration, exfiltration, and room-to-room airflow rates and pressure differences in building systems, and can be driven by mechanical means, wind pressures acting on the exterior of the building, and buoyancy effects induced by temperature differences between zones, including the outdoors. Contaminant concentrations include the transport and fate of airborne contaminants, due to airflow, chemical and radio-chemical transformation, adsorption and desorption to building materials, filtration, and deposition to and resuspension from building surfaces. Personal exposure includes the exposure of building occupants to airborne contaminants, for eventual risk assessment.CONTAM can be useful in a variety of applications. Its ability to calculate building airflow rates and relative pressures between zones of the building is useful for assessing the adequacy of ventilation rates in a building, for determining the variation in ventilation rates over time, for determining the distribution of ventilation air within a building, for estimating the impact of envelope air-tightening efforts on infiltration rates, and for evaluating the energy impacts of building airflows. The program has also been used extensively for the design and analysis of smoke management systems. The prediction of contaminant concentrations can be used to determine the indoor air quality performance of buildings before they are constructed and occupied, to investigate the impacts of various design decisions related to ventilation system design and building material selection, to evaluate indoor air quality control technologies, and to assess the indoor air quality performance of existing buildings. Predicted contaminant concentrations can also be used to estimate personal exposure based on occupancy patterns. Version 2.0 contained several new features including: non-trace contaminants, practically unlimited number of contaminants, contaminant-related libraries, separate weather and ambient contaminant files, building controls, scheduled zone temperatures, improved solver to reduce simulation times and several user interface related features to improve usability. Version 2.1 introduced more new features including the ability to account for spatially varying external contaminants and wind pressures at the building envelope, more new control elements, particlespecific contaminant properties, total mass released calculations and detailed program documentation. Version 2.4 introduced two new deposition sink models, a one-dimensional convection/diffusion contaminant model for ducts and user-selectable zones, new contaminant filter models, control super nodes, super filters, a duct balancing tool, building pressurization and model validity tests and several other usability enhanceme...

Building modelers need simulation tools capable of simultaneously considering building energy use, airflow and indoor air quality (IAQ) to design and evaluate the ability of buildings and their systems to meet today’s demanding energy efficiency and IAQ performance requirements. CONTAM is a widely-used multizone building airflow and contaminant transport simulation tool that requires indoor temperatures as input values. EnergyPlus is a prominent whole-building energy simulation program capable of performing heat transfer calculations that require interzone and infiltration airflows as input values. On their own, each tool is limited in its ability to account for thermal processes upon which building airflow may be significantly dependent and vice versa. This paper describes the initial phase of coupling of CONTAM with EnergyPlus to capture the interdependencies between airflow and heat transfer using co-simulation that allows for sharing of data between independently executing simulation tools. The coupling is accomplished based on the Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) for Co-simulation specification that provides for integration between independently developed tools. A three-zone combined heat transfer/airflow analytical BESTEST case was simulated to verify the co-simulation is functioning as expected, and an investigation of a two-zone, natural ventilation case designed to challenge the coupled thermal/airflow solution methods was performed.

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