No abstract

No abstract

Twenty-seven laboratory experiments were conducted in a simulated smoking room to quantify rates of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) leakage to a non-smoking area as a function of the physical and operational characteristics of the smoking room. Data are presented for the various types of leakage flows, the effect of these leaks on smoking room performance and non-smoker exposure, and the relative importance of each leakage mechanism. The results indicate that the first priority for an effective smoking room is to maintain it depressurized with respect to adjoining non-smoking areas. The amount of ETS pumped out by the smoking room door when it is opened and closed can be reduced significantly by substituting a sliding door for the standard swing-type door. An "open doorway" configuration used twice the ventilation flow as those with smoking room doors, but yielded less reduction in non-smoker exposure. Measured results correlated well with results modeled with mass-balance equations (R 2 = 0.82-0.99). Most of these results are based on sulfur hexafluoride (SF 6 ) tracer gas leakage. Because five measured ETS tracers showed good correlation with SF 6 , these conclusions should apply to ETS leakage as well. Field tests of a designated smoking room in an office building qualitatively agreed with model predictions.KEYWORDS: Environmental tobacco smoke, ventilation, indoor air quality, designated smoking rooms, exposure assessment INTRODUCTION Exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) has been associated with several adverse health effects, including cancer of the lung and sinus (1) . As a result, many workplaces have either limited smoking to designated smoking areas or banned smoking altogether.Liu et al. (2) studied 23 designated smoking areas and found that their effectiveness in preventing ETS leakage varied considerably depending on their design. The most effective smoking area designs were those that had an exhaust to the outside, could maintain a negative pressure, did not recirculate air to the rest of the building, and were enclosed by true "floor-to-floor" walls. These findings imply certain leakage mechanisms in the less successful smoking areas. Page 2 of 23The work reported here consisted of three objectives: 1) to quantify ETS leakage flows as a function of various operating and design parameters in a controlled chamber, 2) to measure the impact of these mechanisms on smoking room performance, and 3) to develop a smoking room performance model and test it both in the chamber and in a real-world smoking room. All three objectives were achieved primarily by measuring the leakage of a sulfur hexafluoride (SF 6 ) tracer gas that had been released in a manner that simulated ETS generation. In some cases, however, the dynamics and transport of the various ETS components can differ substantially from that of SF 6 (3) and from each other (4) . To address this issue, five particle-and gas-phase ETS tracers were measured in a subset of the chamber tests and all field tests.Three potential ETS lea...

No abstract