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A new PM2.5-based CADR method to measure air infiltration rate of buildings

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Abstract

Air infiltration is an important way to exchange indoor air with outdoors. It significantly impacts energy consumption and air quality of buildings. Fine particles (PM2.5) in the outdoor atmosphere environment are a potential natural tracer for the measurement of air infiltration rate, especially in the long term field measurement. In this study, a PM2.5-based method, named as CADR (clean air delivery rate) method, is developed to supplement traditional tracer gas method in order to make routine measurement in realistic environments possible and convenient. An air cleaner is installed indoors to reduce indoor PM2.5 concentration. Air infiltration is determined by fitting a model to the decreasing concentration data. Comparison with CO2 decay method in four different indoor environments gives a normalized mean error of 19% and a correlation coefficient of 0.80 for this method. This justifies the CADR method as a feasible option to measure air infiltration rate. Although subject to several constraints, the proposed method would facilitate field measurement under realistic conditions by being combined with current tracer gas methods.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support was provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51808107), the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2017YFC0702700), the Science and Technology Plan of Changzhou (No. CJ20190018), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. FRF-TP-18-025A2). The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Energy and Environment, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210096, China

    Cong Liu, Siyu Ji, Fengjiao Zhou, Qingbin Lin & Yiqi Chen

  2. School of Civil and Resource Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

    Xiaoliang Shao

Authors
  1. Cong Liu
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  2. Siyu Ji
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  3. Fengjiao Zhou
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  4. Qingbin Lin
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  5. Yiqi Chen
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  6. Xiaoliang Shao
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Correspondence to Cong Liu or Xiaoliang Shao.

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Liu, C., Ji, S., Zhou, F. et al. A new PM2.5-based CADR method to measure air infiltration rate of buildings. Build. Simul. 14, 693–700 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-020-0676-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-020-0676-4

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