Design, implementation, and control of building pressurization to protect occupants from arbitrarily hazardous environments

Abstract

This work presents a practical method of heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) design that provides acceptable indoor air quality throughout a building exposed to an arbitrarily hazardous outside environment. This is achieved by using forced inflow of well-filtered outside air to pressurize the building to the extent that all outside infiltration through the inherently leaky building envelope is constantly eliminated. While accounting for current outside temperature and wind conditions, operating costs are minimized by dynamic control of air inflow to the building at a rate leading to pressure levels that are always only marginally greater than that associated with the onset of zero infiltration.The method includes a design option for multiple interior building pressure zones having sequentially higher levels of pressure/security, where occupants in a higher-pressure zone are also protected from infiltration from a hazardous environment in an adjacent lower-pressure zone, the result, say, of a discharge there of a hazardous airborne agent.