Carbon dioxide as the main hazard in the design of personal ventilation systems

Abstract

Mental work, used everywhere at present, is quite diverse and is characterized by various degrees of responsibility, monotony, attention, and the level of emotional stress. To provide comfortable living conditions for a person in a permanent workplace, it is also necessary to organize air conditioning systems. The most promising for this activity are personal ventilation systems, which provide a high-quality air environment in the area of human breathing while reducing capital and operating costs in comparison with traditional (mixing, displacement ventilation). However, when designing personal ventilation systems, one should not focus on the “average reference man”, but take into account the individual characteristics of the employee (age, gender, etc.) performing a specific type of mental activity. In order to clarify the actual value of carbon dioxide (with a certain degree of error) emitted by a person in a certain mental work, we perform a series of experiments. The authors conducted a significant amount of full-scale experimental investigations, the result of which is the confirmation of nature and dynamics of carbon dioxide`s changes in the room in the absence (inactivity) of ventilation systems (linear dependence), as well as the refinement of the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in a particular type of mental activity. It should be noted that this work is the beginning of large-scale scientific research designed to collect and systematize data on emissions of harmful substances from people engaged in various types of mental activity.