Record Details

Contaminant Crossover in Residential Energy Recovery Ventilators: Mass Spectrometric Analysis and Introducing Remediation Measures

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Contaminant Crossover in Residential Energy Recovery Ventilators: Mass Spectrometric Analysis and Introducing Remediation Measures
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HPZMHN
 
Creator Naveen Weerasekera
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Energy recovery ventilators (ERV) are increasingly present in residential environments to enable energy-efficient provision of controlled outdoor air ventilation. In this work, we investigated pollutant transport through a typical residential ERV as a potential pathway for re-entrainment of indoor air pollutants into the outdoor ventilation air supplied to an indoor space. Specifically, we investigated the transfer of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) through the sandwiched membrane matrix of the ERV core, between two adjacent air streams. Pollutant transfer efficiency is calculated for experiments intentionally injecting two common indoor VOCs (acetone, isopropanol (IPA)) and the behavior of transfer is studied for different ERV exhaust and supply flowrates (supply, exhaust, balanced scenarios). Maximum pollutant transfer efficiency of 17% is recorded for isopropanol at balanced (equal supply and exhaust airflow rates) conditions at intake and exhaust air lines. Maximum pollutant transfer efficiency of 26% and a minimum of 5.3% for unbalanced CFM settings are obtained. For VOCs studies, we observed short response times of
 
Subject Chemistry
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Engineering
proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry
volatile organic compounds
mass transfer
transfer efficiency
pollutant dynamics
 
Contributor Weerasekera, Naveen D