Effect of Contaminant Source Location on Indoor Air Quality

This paper presents an experimental study for understanding the indoor air quality in a room. A model room, which had a ceiling-mounted supply and a sidewall-mounted exhaust, was used to examine the effect of air exchange rate (AER) and contaminant source location (CSL) as a function of the elapsed time. A tracer gas method, using carbon monoxide tracer, gas analyzers, and a data acquisition system, was applied to study the ventilation air distribution and the tracer removal efficiency, so-called pollutant removal efficiency, in the model room. The experiment was composed of two parts; firstly the AER was varied to examine its effect on the ventilation air distribution and the ventilation effectiveness and secondly both AER and CSL were considered to determine their effect on the pollutant removal efficiency. It was found that the ventilation effectiveness in the model was proportional to AER but not linearly. It was also found that changing the CSL can improve the pollutant removal efficiency. In some cases, the efficiency improvement by increasing AER was achieved by simply changing CSL.