A new method for air exchange efficiency assessment including natural and mixed mode ventilation

The COVID-19 health crisis highlighted the correlation between air exchange efficiency and virus airborne transmission. Air exchange efficiency is a performance index able to characterize ventilation effectiveness in buildings. Some standards, such as ASHRAE 129, clearly define assessment procedures of air exchange efficiency for mechanical ventilation, adopting tracer gas techniques. However, standardized procedures are based on measurements at the exhaust and cannot be adopted for natural and mixed mode ventilation strategies. In the ‘80s, Sandberg suggested that tracer gas decay technique enables to measure simultaneously the nominal time constant (through air change rate measurements) and the mean age of air in several points of the ventilated zone. This paper aims to present practical issues and uncertainty analysis related to the implementation of this approach, in a new commissioning protocol. For this purpose, we compare the new procedure, based on Sandberg’s observation, with the ASHRAE 129 protocol for mechanical ventilation. Results coming from field campaigns show that the difference between air exchange efficiency values obtained using ASHRAE 129 protocol (51.8%) and the new procedure (47.4%) are usually negligible in low airflow rate, considering an average uncertainty of ± 7.0%. Results show that the procedure is robust and that it is technically possible to implement it to natural and mixed-mode ventilation.