Managing IAQ at Multiple Scales: From Urban to Personal Microenvironments
Published in Handbook of Indoor Air Quality, 2022
Indoor air quality (IAQ) is vital to human health, comfort, performance, and wellbeing as people typically spend over 80% of their time indoors. The indoor pollutants people are exposed to originate from both indoors and outdoors. In order to devise an energy-efficient and cost-effective approach to improve IAQ, it is necessary to consider strategies across multiple scales—from the outdoor environment around buildings to inside buildings, to rooms, and to the microenvironment around the occupants that directly affect the human exposure and intake of the pollutants. In this chapter, we present a 3-dimensional view of the IAQ engineering: the scales (of environments), the species (of pollutants), and strategies (of IAQ control). The objective is to improve the understanding of and assess the potential and limits of the various source control, ventilation, and air purification strategies across the different scales so that an integrated approach can be developed for managing IAQ. Existing data from previous research on the effectiveness of various IAQ strategies at the different environmental scales are discussed along with an outlook to the future work and challenges.
Recommended citation: Zhang, J., Shen, J., Gao, Z., 2022. Managing IAQ at Multiple Scales: From Urban to Personal Microenvironments. Handbook of Indoor Air Quality 2022:1–42. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5155-5_57-1