Didactic Matter on Indoor Air

A colleague pointed BrooklynDodger(s) to this review, in a journal of which BrooklynDodger(s) was ignorant. The abstract conveys little useful information, but the full text is a good general review with a decent amount of references to the original research.

This is important both in itself, but more important in relation to community air pollution studies. The particle levels are routinely measured by EPA through a network of stations. But the stations are typically in "clean" areas or on roof tops, so as not to be influence by localized point sources. So the relationship of these rooftop data to what people on the ground are breathing outdoors is one issue. The relationship of rooftop to indoor and outdoor air combined is another.

BrooklynDodger(s) expects that the goodness of the correlation would vary with particle size, the smaller the particle the better the correlation. PM10 is mostly crustal dust, PM2.5 and below would be agglomeration, with a peak frequency at around 1 micron.

BrooklynDodger(s) just discovered how to grab a page image out of a pdf and pull it into a blog posting. Whoopee!!!

Above shows penetration into a building based on particle size. It's virtually 100% in the size range of interest.



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Indoor Air 2004; 14 (Suppl 7): 175–183

Indoor particle dynamics

Introduction

Airborne particulate matter (PM) can cause many
deleterious effects. Of concern in indoor environments
are adverse health outcomes and material damage. The
significance of PM as a determinant of indoor air
quality is strongly related to airborne particle concentration,
size distribution, and chemical or biological
composition. In turn, these attributes depend on a suite
of other factors, broadly classified as sources, removal
mechanisms, and transformation processes. In studying
indoor particle dynamics, we seek to elucidate the
causal dependencies of indoor particle concentrations
and fates on the processes that influence them. In this
paper, I first provide an overall framework for thinking
about indoor particle dynamics, and then present a
synopsis of what is known about the key phenomena.

W. W. Nazaroff
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Key words: Deposition; Emissions; Filtration; Material
balance; Penetration; Ultrafine.
Professor William Nazaroff
2108 Shattuck Ave. Rm. 315,
Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering,
2108 Shattuck Avenue #315, University of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720-1716, USA
e-mail: nazaroff@ce.berkeley.edu.



Practical implications
The paper gives a practical overview of issues related to particulate matter indoors, as well as valuable information for understanding filtration and how particles contribute to adverse health effects.