Investigation of indoor environment quality of Chinese large-hub airport terminal buildings through longitudinal field measurement and subjective survey

Abstract

With the economic growth, a large number of airports are being or planned to be constructed or retrofitted in China. Airport terminal buildings have its unique Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ) performance due to its special architectural and operational features. In this research, instrumental objective measurements and questionnaire subjective surveys have been performed to investigate the IEQ of eight major Chinese large-hub airport terminal buildings. The questionnaire surveys show that the majority of overall satisfactory level of the airport terminal buildings lies between just satisfied and satisfied. The environmental factors can explain a part of but not all the variation of travelers' overall satisfactory level. Thermal environment and air quality are the two crucial factors for the overall satisfactory level. Instrumental measurements find that the black globe temperature in departure lounge is averagely 3–5 °C higher than air temperature due to large external glazing. By comparing the subjective and objective observations, the variation of thermal satisfactory level is found to be not as significant as the variation of thermal qualification rate, and travelers' air quality satisfactory level is highly correlated with the CO2 concentration of airport terminals.