B086 Office IAQ assessment

An indoor air quality monitoring and assessment protocol for air-conditioned offices: a case study of Hong Kong

Brief:

People today spend most of their time in indoor environment; optimizing resources for IAQ monitoring is necessary to safeguard the well-being of building occupants. Although continuous measurement of all indoor air pollutants would be good in identifying the needs for the mitigation of IAQ problems, it had significant resources impact and showed to be not practical for implementation in the general community. A systematic yet simple and practical IAQ monitoring and assessment programme for healthy air-conditioned offices is not available. This study presented an IAQ monitoring and assessment protocol for air-conditioned offices for ensuring sustainability of built environment. In particular, the discussion outlined procedures in setting up an IAQ assessment protocol and quantified the required assessment parameters, sampling time and location at acceptable assessment uncertainties for air-conditioned office buildings. The performance of the proposed protocol was evaluated and validated via the database of common indoor air pollutant concentrations in Hong Kong air-conditioned offices as a demonstration. Taking the assessment uncertainties into account, the work presented provided a useful reference for various parties of IAQ engineering in setting up an efficient IAQ monitoring and assessment protocol with cost-effective IAQ improvements, and provide initiatives in promoting better IAQ.

Further Information:

Hui PS, Wong LT, Mui KW, 2009. An indoor air quality monitoring and assessment protocol for air-conditioned offices: a case study of Hong Kong, Proceedings of 2009 conference on Green Building Towards Eco-City, 11-14 October, Taipei, Taiwan, Paper E09, 1-12.