| Abstract [eng] |
In recent times of inceasing urbanization, people are spending more and more time inside of buildings. Poor indoor air quality can lead to a variety of symptoms or even cause some serious illnesses. Research shows that some of those symptoms are caused by volatile organic compounds. These pollutants often enter indoor air from the outside, but a significant amount, especially in newly constructed buildings, are emitted from construction products. Currently, only a small number of European countries apply restrictions on volatile organic compounds in construction products. The EU-LCI concept aims to harmonize and limit the amount of volatile organic compounds allowed in construction products. In this work, the main objective was to use modelling to check weather the EU-LCI concentration values for different organic compounds are sufficient under different indoor conditions to not exceed the concentration limits. In this work, 8 different volatile organic compounds were investigated. These compounds are: 3-carene, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, xylene, benzyl alcohol, styrene, toluene, α-pinene. The simulation was performed for two different sized rooms – a standard room and a school classroom. The size of the loading factors varied for both of these scenarios. Air exchange rate was selected according to the described standards and in this work it was chosen to use 0.25 h-1, 0.5 h-1, 1 h-1and 2 h-1 air exchange rates. It was found that the limit values were not exceeded in all scenarios when the air exchange rate was higher than 1 h-1. It was found that concentrations of formaldehyde and benzyl alcohol did not exceed the limit values in all scenarios with highest loading factor and lowest air exchange rate, meanwhile the concentration of acetaldehyde, in the same scenario, exceeded the limit valuo more than 3 times. There were only 2 of 96 simulation cases, where the limit value was exceeded with the air exchange rate of 0.5 h-1. Both of these cases were modeled in a standard room with the maximum loading factor of 1.4 m2/m3 and lowest air exchange rate. In these cases, acetaldehyde concentration exceeded the limit value at the maximum of 0.13 mg/m3and a-pinene exceeded the limit value at the maximum of 0.27 mg/m3. Additional modeling expetriment was carried out to determine the change of the total concentration of volatile organic compounds over time. During the modeling in a standard room, TVOC concentration reached a maximum concentration of 3.3 mg/m3, which is more that 3 times higher than it‘s limit value. In the classroom experiment, TVOC concentration was higher than limit value and capped at 2.55 mg/m3. |
