Abstract
Indoor air quality influences people’s lives, potentially affecting their health and comfort. Nowadays, ventilation is the only technique commonly used for regulating indoor air quality. CO2 is the reference species considered in order to calculate the air exchange rates of indoor environments. Indeed, regarding air quality, the presence of pleasant or unpleasant odours can strongly influence the environmental comfort. In this paper, a case study of indoor air quality monitoring is reported. The indoor field tests were conducted measuring both CO2 concentration, using a photoacoustic multi-gas analyzer, and odour trends, using an electronic nose, in order to analyze and compare the information acquired. The indoor air monitoring campaign was run for a period of 20 working days into a university room. The work was focused on the determination of both CO2 and odour emission factors (OEF) emitted by the human activity and on the evaluation of the odour impact in a naturally ventilated room. The results highlighted that an air monitoring and recycling system based only on CO2 concentration and temperature measurements might be insufficient to ensure a good indoor air quality, whereas its performances could be improved by integrating the existing systems with an electronic nose for odour detection.
Highlights
Over the last few decades, since the first electronic noses were realized in the 1980s, several studies aimed to investigate some relevant applications of electronic noses for the monitoring of different volatile or semi-volatile pollutants and odour sources.Nowadays, electronic noses are considered the most promising tools for odour monitoring [1]and the use of these instruments in different sectors has increased [2,3]
Odour Emission Factors (OEFs) are useful tools as they are descriptive indicators and predictive, in agreement with the research performed in an environmental field that brought about the development of odour emission factors (OEF) for different kinds of industrial plants such as: wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), Municipal Solid Waste Management Plant (MSWMP), animal rendering plants, and landfills [70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77]
The case study reported in this work presents an innovative method to evaluate the indoor air quality
Summary
Over the last few decades, since the first electronic noses were realized in the 1980s, several studies aimed to investigate some relevant applications of electronic noses for the monitoring of different volatile or semi-volatile pollutants and odour sources.Nowadays, electronic noses are considered the most promising tools for odour monitoring [1]and the use of these instruments in different sectors has increased [2,3]. The food industry, involving several uses, such as process monitoring, freshness evaluation, shelf-life investigation, and authenticity assessment [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. In Italy, the development of electronic noses for the food industry is very active and focused on freshness evaluation, microbial evaluation and authenticity assessment [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]; The healthcare sector that comprehends cosmetics, pharmaceuticals [20,21] and diagnostic [22,23,24,25,26]. In Italy, the research of the electronic nose for the healthcare field is developed in the diagnostic area. Several studies have dealt with issues relating the development of electronic noses as tools for the diagnosis of different cancer types (such as those involving lungs, bladders, and prostates) and the identification of different bacterial infections [27,28,29,30,31,32]; Sensors 2017, 17, 778; doi:10.3390/s17040778 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors
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