Ventilation with outdoor air plays an important role influencing human exposures to indoor pollutants. This review and assessment indicates that increasing ventilation rates above currently adopted standards and guidelines should result in reduced prevalence of negative health outcomes. Building operators and designers should avoid low ventilation rates unless alternative effective measures, such as source control or air cleaning, are employed to limit indoor pollutant levels.

Indoor carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have been used for decades to characterize building ventilation and indoor air quality. Many of these applications require rates of CO2 generation from the building occupants, which are currently based on approaches and data that are several decades old. However, CO2 generation rates can be derived from well-established concepts within the fields of human metabolism and exercise physiology, which relate these rates to body size and composition, diet, and level of physical activity. This paper reviews how CO2 generation rates have been estimated in the past and discusses how they can be characterized more accurately. Based on this information, a new approach to estimating CO2 generation rates is presented, which is based on the described concepts from the fields of human metabolism and exercise physiology. Using this approach and more recent data on body mass and physical activity, values of CO2 generation rates from building occupants are presented along with the variability that may occur based on body mass and activity data.

Three indoor sources (a gas stove, an electric stove, and an electric toaster oven) of ultrafine particles (UFPs) have been studied in an instrumented test house on the campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Previous studies have reported the concentration of ultrafine particles indoors due to cooking, but have been limited to particles with diameters greater than 10 nm. New technology now makes it possible to measure particles as small as 2 nm. Therefore, NIST conducted a study to measure typical concentrations and estimate emission rates and coagulation rates of UFPs in the size range from 2 to 64 nm. More than 150 tests were completed. Peak concentrations from the gas and electric stovetop burners/coils occurred at a particle size of approximately 5 nm. Total number concentrations were as much as 10 times greater than reported in previous studies of particle sizes above 10 nm. Because of these high concentrations of very small particles, coagulation was the dominant process affecting the evolution of the size distribution after the source was turned off. The observed number concentration changes due to coagulation were fit by models including corrections for van der Waals and viscosity forces and fractal shapes. Indoor/outdoor ratios indicated that less than 5% of the <10 nm particles penetrated the house. This suggests that outdoor sources of these ultrafine particles will not contribute substantially to human exposure if indoor sources are present.

The control of outdoor air intake rates in mechanically ventilated buildings based on indoor carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) levels, often referred to as CO 2 demand controlled ventilation (DCV), has the potential for reducing the energy consumption associated with building ventilation in some commercial and institutional buildings. Carbon dioxide DCV has been discussed, promoted, studied and demonstrated for about twenty years, but questions still remain regarding the actual energy savings potential as a function of climate, ventilation system features, and building occupancy. In addition, questions exist as to the indoor air quality (IAQ) impacts of the approach and the best way to implement CO 2 DCV in general and in a given building. This report presents a state-of-the-art review of CO 2 DCV technology and application including discussion of the concept and its application, and a literature review. In addition the regulatory and standard requirements impacting CO 2 DCV are also examined.

Ultrafine particles (UFP) (<100 nm) have been related to adverse human health effects such as oxidative stress and cardiovascular mortality. However, human exposure to particles of outdoor origin is heavily dependent on their infiltration into homes. The infiltration factor (Finf) and its variation as a function of several factors becomes of enormous importance in epidemiological studies. The objective of this study is to investigate the transport of UFP into a residential building and to determine the functional dependence of infiltration on particle size and air change rate. A secondary objective was to estimate the values of the penetration coefficient P and composite deposition rate kcomp that enter into the definition of Finf. Using continuous measurements of indoor and outdoor concentrations of size-resolved particles ranging from 5 to 100 nm in a manufactured test house, particle penetration through the building, composite deposition, and the resulting value of Finf were calculated for two cases: closed windows and one window open 7.5 cm. Finf ranged from close to 0 (particles<10 nm) to 0.3 (particles>80 nm) with windows closed and from 0 to 0.6 with one window open. The penetration coefficient (closed windows) increased from about 0.2 for 10-nm particles to an asymptote near 0.6 for particles from 30-100 nm. Open window penetration coefficients were higher, ranging from 0.6 to 0.8. Closed-window composite deposition rates, which included losses to the furnace filter and to the ductwork as well as to interior surfaces, monotonically decreased from levels of about 1.5 h(-1) for 10-nm particles to 0.3 h(-1) for 100-nm particles. For the open-window case, composite deposition rates were higher for particles<20 nm, reaching values of 3.5 h(-1). Mean standard errors associated with estimates of P, kcomp, and Finf for two series of measurements ranged from 1.0% to 4.4%.