Article Title
A new PM2.5-based CADR method to measure air infiltration rate of buildings
Keywords
natural ventilation, outdoor-indoor-connection, haze, formaldehyde, VOCs, exposure
Abstract
Air infiltration is an important way to exchange indoor air with outdoors. It significantly impacts energy consumption and air quality of buildings. Fine particles (PM2.5) in the outdoor atmosphere environment are a potential natural tracer for the measurement of air infiltration rate, especially in the long term field measurement. In this study, a PM2.5-based method, named as CADR (clean air delivery rate) method, is developed to supplement traditional tracer gas method in order to make routine measurement in realistic environments possible and convenient. An air cleaner is installed indoors to reduce indoor PM2.5 concentration. Air infiltration is determined by fitting a model to the decreasing concentration data. Comparison with CO2 decay method in four different indoor environments gives a normalized mean error of 19% and a correlation coefficient of 0.80 for this method. This justifies the CADR method as a feasible option to measure air infiltration rate. Although subject to several constraints, the proposed method would facilitate field measurement under realistic conditions by being combined with current tracer gas methods.
Publisher
Tsinghua University Press
Recommended Citation
Cong Liu, Siyu Ji, Fengjiao Zhou, Qingbin Lin, Yiqi Chen, Xiaoliang Shao. A new PM2.5-based CADR method to measure air infiltration rate of buildings. Building Simulation 2021, 14(03): 693-700.
