On Measuring Air Infiltration Rates Using Tracer Gases in Buildings with Presence Controlled Mechanical Ventilation Systems

The ventilation and air leakage of a school building was investigated. Information was collected from the parameters of the mechanical ventilation system and from measurements of the local mean age of air using the homogeneous emission method. While the average local mean ages of air can be accurately measured by passive integrative samplers, the estimation of the average room specific air change rate by taking the inverse of the measured average local mean age of air did not give correct results. The main problem is that integrative sampling represents a linear averaging process that is inappropriate to capture the average of nonlinearly related properties. This problem is accentuated when the ventilation rates for different periods differ a lot. A simple computational model was developed to discuss the system behavior. A partial solution to the measurement problem is to actively sample the different populations of air change rates separately