| Title | Distribution Of Residential Air Leakage: Implications For Health Consequences Of An Outdoor Toxic Release |
| Publication Type | Conference Proceedings |
| Year of Publication | 2005 |
| Authors | Wanyu R Chan, Phillip N Price, William W Nazaroff, Ashok J Gadgil |
| Conference Name | Proceedings of The 10th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality and Climate - Indoor Air 2005 |
| Volume | 2(6) |
| Pagination | 1729-1733 |
| Publisher | Tsinghua University Press |
| Conference Location | Beijing, China |
| Keywords | air infiltration, air leakage, air-exchange rate, airflow and pollutant transport group, countermeasures to chemical and biological threats, indoor environment department, outdoor toxic release, shelter-in-place |
| Abstract | Reasonably airtight buildings can protect occupants from large-scale outdoor airborne releases. However, some houses are leaky, as air tightness tends to vary greatly in a housing stock. We modeled the health consequences if a single-family residential community were to "shelter-in-place," for two different models of a toxic release: (I) a simple Gaussian puff, and (II) a realistic simulation of outdoor transport and dispersion generated by the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center. We predicted the health effects under two different assumptions: (1) every house has the same indoor-outdoor air-exchange rate, or (2) the houses have a lognormal distribution of air-exchange rates. The assumption that every house has the same air-exchange rate (at the median of the actual distribution) can lead to an under-prediction of the community area adversely affected by the release by a factor of 3 or more. The difference is largest if the dose-response relationship of the chemical is highly nonlinear. |
