MEASUREMENT AND SIMULATION OF THE INDOOR AIR QUALITY IMPACT OF GASEOUS AIR CLEANERS IN A TEST HOUSE By

Residential and commercial gaseous air cleaning technologies have not gained wide acceptance in the marketplace, in part due to the lack of performance data from field tests or simulation studies. This paper describes a field study of the performance of two gaseous air cleaners in a single room test house and simulations based on these tests with an indoor air quality model (CONTAMW). Air cleaner effective cleaning rates (ECR) were experimentally measured for toluene and ranged from 93 m/h to 202 m/h compared to the average toluene loss rates of 18 m/h due to infiltration and 7.7 m/h due to sorption on surfaces in the house. As a result, the effectiveness of the air cleaners for toluene in these tests ranged from 82 % to 94 % for different experimental conditions. CONTAMW proved to be an effective tool for predicting the impact of air cleaner performance in the single zone environment. INDEX TERMS Air cleaners, Indoor air, VOC transport, Field study, Model validation INTRODUCTION To date, the residential and commercial air cleaning market has focused on particle removal. However, recent interest has emerged related to gaseous air cleaning systems for the residential/commercial indoor environment. Current performance evaluation of these cleaners has primarily occurred in the laboratory, often using high challenge concentrations of chemicals, low airflow rates, single contaminant species, and controlled temperature and relative humidity (Silberstein, 1991; VanOsdell, 1994). Before the potential benefits of gaseous air cleaning devices are realized, however, there is a need for performance data from field tests as well as performance prediction tools based on indoor air quality modeling. To this end, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is conducting tests to measure and simulate the performance of several gaseous air cleaners. This paper focuses on experiments completed in a single room test house to determine the removal effectiveness of toluene using a portable room air cleaner with adsorption media and an in-duct air cleaner with chemisorption media. Environmental conditions and tracer concentrations were measured on a semi-real time basis to allow for calculation of all removal mechanisms including sorption on surfaces, infiltration, and air cleaner removal. Air cleaner performance was determined two ways including a direct upstream versus downstream measurement and empirical determination with a single zone mass balance model. Results from these experiments were then used to evaluate the predictive capability of CONTAMW. ∗ Contact author email: [email protected] Proceedings: Indoor Air 2002