Abstract
Indoor air quality (IAQ) remains a very important issue because it can significantly affect people’s health, comfort and productivity. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) comprise an important group of chemicals that are commonly present in indoor air. They are related to the sick building syndrome (SBS) and exposure to VOCs is of considerable concern due to their potential chronic and acute health outcomes which includes eye irritation, nose and throat discomfort, headache, allergic skin reaction, nausea, fatigue, or dizziness. Most of the times the effects of VOCs on human health are amplified by indoor conditions such as temperature and humidity. The paper presents the findings of the analysis of the relationship between total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) concentrations and their influencing factors like indoor comfort parameters (temperature and relative humidity) and the type of indoor spaces (offices, residential and educational). Keywords: TVOC concentrations, indoor comfort parameters, Pearson correlation coefficients
Highlights
Indoor air quality (IAQ) remains a very important issue because it can significantly affect people’s health, comfort and productivity
A recent article [2] reported the mean concentration of total volatile organic compounds (TVOC) as 465.8μg/m3 (145.3÷1503.2μg/m3) in winter and 321.8μg/m3 (90.7÷1,100.9μg/m3) in summer for indoor air of the library of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, a range of 100 and 538μg/m3 for TVOC concentrations was reported in indoor air of some Japanese University classrooms [24]
The TVOC concentrations varied from 0.17pm to 0.3ppm (390.1 688.5μg/m3 isobutylene units) in office spaces, between 0.1pm to 0.38 ppm (229.5÷872.1μg/m3 isobutylene units) in residential spaces, and from 0.34ppm to 1.11ppm (780.3÷2,547.3μg/m3 isobutylene units) in educational spaces, being the highest ones
Summary
Indoor air quality (IAQ) remains a very important issue because it can significantly affect people’s health, comfort and productivity. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) comprise an important group of chemicals that are commonly present in indoor air They are related to the sick building syndrome (SBS) and exposure to VOCs is of considerable concern due to their potential chronic and acute health outcomes which includes eye irritation, nose and throat discomfort, headache, allergic skin reaction, nausea, fatigue, or dizziness. The main objective of this paper is to analyze, by monitoring and statistical interpretation, the correlation between TVOC concentrations and other comfort parameters simple to determine as temperature – θ and relative humidity - φ under monitoring conditions, for different type of spaces (offices, residential and educational), located in urban area of Bucharest city (fig.). The studies were performed in spaces with different types of activities, located in districts 2 and 3 of urban area of Bucharest, the largest city and the capital of Romania (fig.1)
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