NCEMBT/ERC-UIC Task 8 Reduced Indoor Contamination in Commercial Buildings

Subtask 8.1

Full-scale Experimental Evaluation of Air Cleaning Devices

for Residential Houses

Investigators: W. Chen (wchen13@syr.edu), Dr. Jensen Zhang (PI), B. Guo and Z. Gao

Building Energy and Environmental Systems Laboratory (http://BEESL.syr.edu)

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Syracuse University

Background and Objectives

Air cleaning is a viable approach to improving indoor air quality in an energy efficient manner. However, there is a lack of performance data for commercially available air cleaning devices that deal with both gas phase and particulate pollutants. A standard evaluation method is also lacking when multiple pollutants co-exist in the indoor environment. The objectives of this study are to:

• Establish a set of baseline data on the performance of commercially available air cleaning devices;
• Develop a test protocol for full-scale chamber evaluation of the air cleaning devices under multiple pollutant environmental conditions.

Methodology

The full-scale environmental chamber (Figure 1) at Syracuse University’s Building Energy and Environmental Systems Laboratory (BEESL, http://BEESL.syr.edu) will be used for the experimental evaluation. A “pull-down” test approach will be used to determine the effectiveness of the air cleaning devices in reducing multiple pollutant concentrations from an initial concentration level in the chamber (Figure 2).