International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—The aim of the paper is to show that it is very important to take into account indoor pollution when studying the health effects of the quality of the air we are breathing. The simulations must consider the indoor emissions because they are the ones that make the concentrations of the air that we breathe are different from the outdoor concentrations. We have performed a simulation exercise of air quality both outdoor and indoor in 2 buildings (office and home) located in the center of Madrid (Spain), with different scenarios of indoor emissions to isolate their impacts. The simulations are run over full year 2016 with hourly outputs. The simulations must also model atmospheric dynamics to produce meteorological data that will be key to indoor simulations. Exposure to pollutant concentrations has been calculated based on a predefined pattern that indicates where the person is at each time. In indoor pollution simulations it is very important to model all the physical processes that affect concentrations, such as: emission, infiltration, deposition, mechanical and manual ventilation (closely related to the thermal comfort range of the building) and air exchange between rooms through the doors. The highest impact on health is produced by the emissions that are released when people are cooking.

Index Terms—Exposure, health impact, indoor pollution, outdoor simulation.

Roberto San José, Juan L. Pérez, and Libia Pérez are with Environmental Software and Modelling Group, Computer Science School, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Madrid, Spain (e-mail: roberto@fi.upm.es, jlperez@fi.upm.es, lperez@fi.upm.es).
R. M. Gonzalez is with Department of Physics and Meteorology, Faculty of Physics, Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid, Spain (e-mail: rgbarras@fis.ucm.es).

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Cite: Roberto San José, Juan L. Pérez, Libia Pérez, and Rosa M. González, "Health Effects of Indoor Emissions Combining Outdoor and Indoor Pollution Simulations," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 10, no. 11, pp. 394-398, 2019.

Copyright © 2019 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).