B129

IAQ index for assessing air-conditioned offices

Brief:

It is costly to sample all air pollutants of a general community for Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) assessments. To optimize the resources for IAQ monitoring, this study proposes a simple IAQ index to identify an asymptomatic air-conditioned office with probable unsatisfactory IAQ. The IAQ index is determined from the fractional dose of some representative common indoor air pollutants of unsatisfactory IAQ, either by taking equal importance of the pollutants as a weighting factor or weighted by the regional failure rates with respective to the corresponding air pollutants. The proposed IAQ index of a screening assessment was used for verifying air-conditioned offices of Hong Kong. The results showed that satisfactory and unsatisfactory offices were correctly identified by the unweighted and weighted IAQ indices respectively. This study also presents a useful reference for policymakers, building owners and professionals for indoor environmental assessments elsewhere.

Further information:

Mui KW, Wong LT, 2014. IAQ index for assessing air-conditioned offices, Paper ID: 1311. Asian Conference on Civil, Material and Environmental Sciences, July 2014, Sapporo, Japan. ISBN 978-986-89298-0-7.