Quantitative Prediction of Traffic Pollutant Transmission into Buildings

Abstract

An integrated air quality model that combines a CFD model and multi-room pollutant transport model has been developed to study the effect of traffic pollution on indoor air quality of a multi-room building located in close proximity to busy roads. The CFD model conducts the large eddy simulation of the three-dimensional turbulent flows and pollutant transport processes in outdoor, whereas the multi-room pollutant transport model performs zonal airflow and pollutant transport in indoor. The integrated model is verified with available field measurement of traffic-induced CO concentrations. Twelve scenarios of numerical experiments for various configurations of window openness are carried out to study the effects of the air change rate and the outdoor pollutant dispersion on indoor air quality. It is concluded that the windward side opening is a significant factor contributing to indoor air quality. Using air inlets on the sideward and leeward envelopes simultaneously can effectively lower the daily mean and peak indoor levels of traffic pollutants and maintain a desirable air change rate.

Opportunities for using spatial property assessment data in air pollution exposure assessments

“…Population level epidemiological studies of air pollution commonly use an indirect approach to exposure assessment by assigning exposure levels based on outdoor ambient air pollution levels at the residential location, even though an increasing number of personal monitoring studies have shown that exposure measurements based on ambient monitoring are usually lower than those derived from personal monitoring [ 13 ]. Strong associations have been found between indoor and outdoor PM 2.5 concentrations which indicate that a significant proportion of indoor fine particles are of outdoor origin [ 14 ], and other studies have identified specific building characteristics that influence infiltration rates, for example, type of basement, and year of construction [ 15 ].…”

Indoor air quality prediction systems for smart environments: A systematic review

“…After applying the above-mentioned eligibility criteria, the authors obtained 40 papers for the third stage, which were studied in detail. In this list, two papers only focus on outdoor air quality [64,97], eight papers do not include any AI-specific prediction algorithms [22,31,47,50,84,91,116,122] or were based on some mathematical approaches. Three papers [12,96,137] only focused on thermal comfort (temperature and/or humidity data) or other smart building aspects instead of air quality.…”

Transport mechanisms of airborne particulate matters in partitioned indoor environment

“…Numerical simulations of PM transport can be classified into the Eulerian and Lagrangian approaches. Most Eulerian approach works [5][6][7][8] are mainly based on the advection-diffusion equation together with the gravity settling, which takes less computing resources. However, this approach models the particulate phase as a continuum phase, and is only adequate for simulating gaseous pollutants or small, noninertial particles that exactly follow indoor airflow.…”