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Impact of indoor ventilation efficiency on acetone inhalation exposure concentration and tissue dose in respiratory tract

  • Research Article
  • Indoor/Outdoor Airflow and Air Quality
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Abstract

A significant feature of the indoor environment is the heterogeneity of airflow and pollutant distributions, which are primarily dependent on ventilation systems. In the case of short- and high-concentration exposures to hazardous chemical pollutants, it may be necessary to precisely determine the concentration in the breathing zone or, more directly, the inhalation exposure concentration in the respiratory tract, rather than the representative room average concentration in an indoor environment, because of the non-uniformity of pollutant concentration distributions. In this study, we developed a computer-simulated person with a detailed respiratory system to predict inhalation exposure concentration and inhalation dose via transient breathing and reported a demonstrative numerical simulation for analyzing acetone concentration distributions in a simplified model room. Our numerical analysis revealed that the ventilation efficiency distribution in a room could change significantly by changing the design of the ventilation system, and that the inhalation exposure concentration estimated by a computer-simulated person could differ from the representative concentration, such as perfect-mixing or volume-averaged acetone concentration, by a factor of two or more.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially funded by the Japan Science and Technology (JST), CREST Japan (No. JP 20356547), and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) (No. JP 22H00237 and No. JP 20KK0099), Health Labour Sciences Research Grant (No. JP 21KD2002), MEXT as “Program for Promoting Researches on the Supercomputer Fugaku” (No. JPMXP1020210316). The computation was partially performed using the computer resources offered under the category of Intensively Promoted Projects by the Research Institute for Information Technology, Kyushu University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Ocean and Civil Engineering, Dalian Ocean University, Dalian, 116023, China

    Cong Li

  2. Faculty of Engineering Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, 816-8580, Japan

    Sung-Jun Yoo & Kazuhide Ito

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  1. Cong Li
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  2. Sung-Jun Yoo
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  3. Kazuhide Ito
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Cong Li, Sung-Jun Yoo, and Kazuhide Ito. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Cong Li and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Cong Li.

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Declaration of competing interest

The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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Li, C., Yoo, SJ. & Ito, K. Impact of indoor ventilation efficiency on acetone inhalation exposure concentration and tissue dose in respiratory tract. Build. Simul. 16, 427–441 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-022-0954-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-022-0954-4

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