Journal Home > Volume 15 , Issue 5

Some Swedish school buildings built in the 1960s and 1970s experience indoor air quality problems, where the contaminants are suspected to come from the crawl space underneath the building. The poor indoor air quality causes discomfort among pupils and teachers. Installing an exhaust fan to maintain a negative pressure difference in the crawl space relative to indoors or increasing the ventilation in the classroom are two examples of common measures taken to improve the indoor air quality. However, these measures are not always effective, and sometimes the school building has to be demolished. The relation between pressure distribution, contaminant concentration in the classroom, outdoor temperature, wind, mechanical ventilation, and air leakage distribution is complex. A better understanding of these relations is crucial for making decisions on the most efficient measure to improve the indoor air quality. In this paper, a model for contaminant infiltration from the crawl space is used together with the Monte Carlo method to study these relations. Simulations are performed for several cases where different building shapes, building orientations, shielding conditions, and geographical locations are simulated. Results show, for example, that for a building with an imbalanced ventilation system, air is leaking from the crawl space to the classroom for the majority of cases and that concentration levels in the classroom are usually the highest during mild and calm days.


menu
Abstract
Full text
Outline
About this article

Impact of weather conditions and building design on contaminant infiltration from crawl spaces in Swedish schools—Numerical modeling using Monte Carlo method

Show Author's information Fredrik Domhagen( )Paula WahlgrenCarl-Eric Hagentoft
Department for Architecture and Civil Engineering, Division of Building Technology, Chalmers University of Technology, SE-412 96, Gothenburg, Sweden

Abstract

Some Swedish school buildings built in the 1960s and 1970s experience indoor air quality problems, where the contaminants are suspected to come from the crawl space underneath the building. The poor indoor air quality causes discomfort among pupils and teachers. Installing an exhaust fan to maintain a negative pressure difference in the crawl space relative to indoors or increasing the ventilation in the classroom are two examples of common measures taken to improve the indoor air quality. However, these measures are not always effective, and sometimes the school building has to be demolished. The relation between pressure distribution, contaminant concentration in the classroom, outdoor temperature, wind, mechanical ventilation, and air leakage distribution is complex. A better understanding of these relations is crucial for making decisions on the most efficient measure to improve the indoor air quality. In this paper, a model for contaminant infiltration from the crawl space is used together with the Monte Carlo method to study these relations. Simulations are performed for several cases where different building shapes, building orientations, shielding conditions, and geographical locations are simulated. Results show, for example, that for a building with an imbalanced ventilation system, air is leaking from the crawl space to the classroom for the majority of cases and that concentration levels in the classroom are usually the highest during mild and calm days.

Keywords: indoor air quality, crawl space, air permeability, Monte Carlo method, airtightness, infiltration model

References(16)

Airaksinen M, Pasanen P, Kurnitski J, et al. (2004). Microbial contamination of indoor air due to leakages from crawl space: A field study. Indoor Air, 14: 55–64.

Annesi-Maesano I, Baiz N, Banerjee S, et al. (2013). Indoor air quality and sources in schools and related health effects. Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part B, 16: 491–550.

Chan W, Joh I, Sherman M (2012). LBNL-5967E. Analysis of air leakage measurements from residential diagnostics database.https://doi.org/10.2172/1163524
DOI
Dols WS, Polidoro BJ (2015). NIST TN 1887. CONTAM User Guide and Program Documentation Version 3.2. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Available at https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.TN.1887.
DOI
Domhagen F, Wahlgren P, Hagentoft CE (2019). Contaminant transport through the thermal envelope: Evaluation of airflows based on numerical modeling and field measurements. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Thermal Performance of the Exterior Envelope of Whole Buildings, Clearwater Beach, FL, USA.
Domhagen F, Wahlgren P, Hagentoft CE (2020). Pressure distribution around the thermal envelope—A parametric study of the impact from wind and temperature on contaminant transport within a building. In: Proceedings of the 12th Nordic Symposium on Building Physics, Tallinn, Estonia.https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202017211004
DOI
Feustel HE, Raynor-Hoosen A (1990). Fundamentals of the multizone airflow model COMIS. Coventry, UK: Air Infiltration and Ventilation Centre.
Hagentoft CE (1986). Report TVBH 3012. An analytical model for crawlspace temperatures and heat flows: Steady-state, periodic and step-response components. Lund University.

Haghighat F, Megri AC (1996). A comprehensive validation of two airflow models—COMIS and CONTAM. Indoor Air, 6: 278–288.

Hilling R (1994). 220 skolor. Skador och fel i skolbyggnader. Sweden: Sveriges Tekniska Forskningsinstitut. Available at http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-4432. (in Swedish)

Janssen H (2013). Monte-Carlo based uncertainty analysis: Sampling efficiency and sampling convergence. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 109: 123–132.

Levin P (2016). Brukarindata Bostäder. Stockholm: SVEBY. (in Swedish)
Moujalled B, Leprince V, Melois A (2018). French database of building airtightness, statistical analyses of about 215, 000 measurements: Impacts of buildings characteristics and seasonal variations. In: Proceedings of the 39th AIVC Conference "Smart ventilation for buildings", Antibes Juan-Les-Pins, France.
Nordquist B (1996). 17 sunda hus: Goda exempel, daghem och skolor. (BFR T-skrift; Vol. 1996: T1). Byggforskningsrådet (BFR). Available at http://www.byggnadsmaterial.lth.se/kontakt/helena-klein/projektet-arvet-efter-bfr/bfr-skannade-skrifter/. (in Swedish)
Orme M, Liddament MW, Wilson A (1994). Technical Note AIVC 44. Numerical data for air infiltration and natural ventilation calculations. Coventry, UK: Air Infiltration and Ventilation Centre.
SMHI (n. d.). SMHI Open Data. Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI). Available at http://www.smhi.se/data/utforskaren-oppna-data/. Accessed 1 Jun 2020.
Publication history
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Rights and permissions

Publication history

Received: 15 February 2021
Revised: 28 July 2021
Accepted: 07 August 2021
Published: 06 September 2021
Issue date: May 2022

Copyright

© The Author(s) 2021

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

The project has been funded by FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning and supported by Gothenburg Premises Administration.

Rights and permissions

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Return