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Buildings & Construction

Indoor air quality

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Displaying 1 - 25 of 428

A Collection of Dwellings to Represent the U.S. Housing Stock

February 4, 2025
Author(s)
Nathan Lima, Andrew K. Persily, Steven Emmerich
This report presents a comprehensive update to the collection of dwellings used to represent the U.S. housing stock, reflecting changes and trends up to the year 2024. This update aims to ensure the collection remains relevant and accurately mirrors the

VOC Emission Rates from an Indoor Surface Using a Flux Chamber and PTR-MS

December 1, 2024
Author(s)
Han Huynh, Jenna Ditto, Michael Link, Dustin Poppendieck, Delphine Farmer, Marina Vance, Jonathan Abbatt
Arising from the Chemical Assessment of Surfaces and Air (CASA) 2022 study at the NIST Net-Zero Energy Residential Test Facility (NZERTF), this paper presents the first evaluation of indoor surface emissions to a house measured with a surface flux chamber

Byproduct Formation from Portable Air Cleaners under Standard Test Conditions

July 8, 2024
Author(s)
Dustin Poppendieck, Michael Link, Rileigh Robertson
Use of air cleaners has increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic and wildfire frequency. A wide range of air cleaning technologies have been implemented in various products, although the potential of these technologies to form byproducts is largely unknown

Chemical characteristics of indoor aerosol particles and surface films

July 8, 2024
Author(s)
Rachel O'Brien, Cate Shirilla, Amy Hrdina, Emily Legaard, Kathryn Mayer, Marina Vance, Dustin Poppendieck, Delphine Farmer
Indoor surfaces and the films on them play important roles in indoor air quality due to the high surface area to volume ratios in our homes. The chemical complexity of these films can be large, and this can increase after film formation as the chemicals in

Impacts of Aging and Relative Humidity on Biomass Burning Smoke in an Indoor Environment

July 8, 2024
Author(s)
Marina Vance, Liora Mael, Sofie Schwink, Kathryn Mayer, Thomas Dunnington, Maximilian Schmid, Nicholas Gotlib, Andrew Martin, Dustin Poppendieck, Delphine Farmer
We studied the impacts of aging and relative humidity on simulated wildfire smoke in a test house during the Chemical Assessments of Surfaces and Air (CASA) study. We injected fresh and ozone-aged biomass burning smoke into the test house during times of

The Chemical Assessment of Surfaces and Air (CASA) Study: Using chemical and physical perturbations in a test house to investigate indoor processes

June 21, 2024
Author(s)
Delphine K Farmer, Marina E Vance, Dustin Poppendieck, Jon Abbatt, Michael R Alves, Karen C Dannemiller, Cholaphan Deeleepojananan, Jenna Ditto, Brian P. Dougherty, Olivia R Farinas, Allen H Goldstein, Vicki H Grassian, Han Huynh, Deborah Kim, Jon C King, Jesse Kroll, Jienan Li, Michael Link, Liora Mael, Kathryn Mayer, Andrew B Martin, Glenn Morrison, Rachel O'Brien, Shubhransgshu Pandit, Barbara Turpin, Marc Webb, Jie Yu, Stephen Zimmerman
The Chemical Assessment of Surfaces and Air (CASA) study aimed to understand how chemicals transform in the indoor environment using perturbations (e.g., cooking, cleaning) or additions of indoor and outdoor pollutants in a well-controlled test house

The Impact of Outdoor Air Ventilation in School Corridors

April 1, 2024
Author(s)
Lisa Ng, Diane Mills
There were about 55.4 million students enrolled in U.S. elementary and secondary schools in 2021 [1]. Worldwide, there were about 614 million secondary students and 739 million primary students [2], representing over 17 % of our global population [3]. In

Jingle bells, what are those smells? Indoor VOC emissions from a live Christmas tree

March 1, 2024
Author(s)
Dustin Poppendieck, Rileigh Robertson, Michael F. Link
Every year in the United States conifers are purchased to serve as Christmas trees in homes where they emit volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to the indoor environment. Although many studies have measured the ecosystem-level emissions of VOCs from conifers

Working from Home and the Impacts on Residential Buildings

March 1, 2024
Author(s)
William M. Healy, Kristen Cetin, Richard Karg, Chandra Sekhar, Li Song, Jerzy Sowa, Iain Walker, Pawel Wargocki
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a rapid and dramatic shift in the number of people working from home. For ASHRAE, the shift to more work from home has an impact on its mission. Most notably, key metrics for performance of the built environment

Sensitivity Analysis of CO2 Concentrations as Ventilation Metrics

October 5, 2023
Author(s)
Oluwatobi Oke, Andrew K. Persily
An approach has previously been developed to estimate space-specific carbon dioxide (CO2) levels that can serve as metrics for the adequacy of outdoor ventilation rates. These metrics are based on the CO2 concentration expected in a space given its

Ozone Generation from a Germicidal Ultraviolet Lamp with Peak Emission at 222 nm

July 21, 2023
Author(s)
Michael F. Link, Andrew Shore, Behrang Hamadani, Dustin Poppendieck
Recent interest in commercial devices containing germicidal ultraviolet lamps with a peak emission wavelength at 222 nm (GUV222) has focused on mitigating virus transmission indoors while posing minimum risk to human tissue. However, 222 nm light can

Application of Indoor CO2 in Response to the Pandemic

April 3, 2023
Author(s)
Andrew K. Persily, Oluwatobi Oke
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been many recommendations to monitor indoor CO2 concentrations. However, the technical basis for these recommendations and stated concentration limits are not always clear. This article discusses the

Implementing NIST Infiltration Correlations

March 31, 2023
Author(s)
Jyrteanna Teo, Lisa Ng
This tutorial is a guide on how to implement the NIST infiltration correlations (Ng et al., 2021) into EnergyPlus building energy simulation software for the US Department of Energy prototype commercial buildings. The implementation can also be generalized

Modelling Study of Interactions of Ozone and Hydrogen Peroxide on Indoor Surfaces

March 15, 2023
Author(s)
Dustin Poppendieck, Toby J. Carter, David Shaw, Nicola Carslaw
In recent decades, the role of the indoor microenvironment in our exposure to air pollutants has become clearer. Indoor air pollutants are emitted from common household items, including building materials and furnishings, and can then undergo chemical

Simulation of Residential CO Exposures from Portable Generators with and without CO Hazard Mitigation Systems Meeting Requirements of Voluntary Standards, Revision 1

December 28, 2022
Author(s)
Steven Emmerich, Brian Polidoro, Matthew Hnatov, Janet Buyer, Matthew Brookman
This report documents work performed by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC or Commission) under an interagency agreement in support of the Commission's effort to address the

Using a Single-Zone Residential Model to Evaluate Virus Particle Exposure

September 20, 2022
Author(s)
Stephen Zimmerman, Brian Polidoro, Lisa Ng, William Stuart Dols, Steven Emmerich
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic. As noted by ASHRAE and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), engineering and other controls should be part of a broader
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