Page 33 - Climate Control News Magazine

Indoor Air Quality
Understanding indoor air pollution
RESEARCHERS FROM 13 universities in the United States came together re- cently to better understand how chemi- cal compounds indoors interact and transform throughout the home.
To address this a fleet of experts from CIRES/University of Colorado Boulder, Uni- versity of Texas, and more set up trailers around a house testing facility, equipped with a slew of sophisticated instruments.
The team replicated household activi- ties like cleaning with bleach, spritzing hairspray, even gathering a dozen people to cook a holiday dinner—and measure the resulting spectrum of air and sur- face chemistry in an unprecedented ini- tiative to identify the key causes of in- door air pollution.
The month-long project, called HO- MEChem (House Observations of Mi- crobial and Environmental Chemistry), incorporated measurements from more than 15 research groups from 13 univer- sities. Experiments took place inside the one-of-a-kind “Utest House” facility at the University of Texas Austin’s J.J. Pick- le Research Campus.
“The HOMEChem study is exciting because it is bringing a broad suite of state-of-the-art analytical instrumenta- tion into the indoor environment, spe- cifically the home environment,” said Wyatt Brown, PhD candidate working under CIRES Fellow Jose Jimenez. “There has never been a study with the breadth of instrumentation that HOMEChem has for looking at the indoor environ- ment. Campaigns like this are standard for aircraft and ground campaigns, but never has the indoor environment been looked at with this level of sophistica- tion.” Working in a variety of fields in- cluding engineering, chemistry, and mi- crobiology, the experiment will be on a scale never previously attempted. HO- MEChem is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Researchers continued tak- ing measurements throughout June while experiments were also being conducted within the UTest House to simulate nor- mal human activities, such as cooking and cleaning.
The team hosted a large social gather- ing: About 12 people cook and share a holiday dinner, but instead of focusing on family and flavor, they assessed the impact of human occupation on indoor air quality and surface chemistry.
ABOVE: Cockrell School of Engineering professor Atila Novoselac, Co-Host of HOMEChem
RIGHT: CIRES Researchers Doug Day (left) and Wyatt Brown (right) collecting data in the UTest house.
Researchers from the University of Colo- rado Boulder and Colorado State University did the planning with Faculty members in the Cockrell School’s Center for Energy and Environmental Resources hosting the ex- periments, with key players in the UT De- partment of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Civil, Architectural and En- vironmental Engineering.
“The UTest House really is the ideal structure to conduct the unprecedented HOMEChem project,” according to Hildebrandt Ruiz, assistant professor in the University of Texas McKetta Depart- ment of Chemical Engineering. “While much of the attention has been focused on outdoor air pollution, many engi- neers and scientists have devoted their careers to better understanding the fac- tors affecting indoor air quality. I am ex- cited about this first-of-its-kind project.”
The study has obvious implications for the indoor air quality research commu- nity, as well as other fields. ✺
CLIMATE CONTROL NEWS
AUGUST 2018
33