Eco-Efficiency of Air Cleaning Technologies

摘要

Occupants' comfort and health is negatively affected by poor indoor air quality. Achieving good indoor air quality is a difficult engineering task due to numerous pollutants and pollutions sources. Air cleaning technologies serve as a primary technological option capable in removing pollutants from both indoor and ventilation (outdoor air). While air cleaning removes air pollutants, it also increases the energy consumption and operating costs of a building. From the perspective of sustainable building concept, air cleaners should also follow the principles of eco-design and resource efficiency. These aspects should be evaluated by eco-efficiency method, combining both environmental burden and economic benefits through the whole air cleaner lifecycle. This research aimed in the eco-efficiency assessment of a complex air cleaning technology (combination of low temperature plasma, photocatalysis, electrostatic precipitation, and catalytic filtration), and compared against a filtration/adsorption system. Eco-efficiency was performed according to the standardized rules set in ISO 14045:2012. The system boundary was set to the processes of the chosen air filtration technologies. Functional unit was set to the 876 Km3 of treated air, which represents a half year operation at an hourly flowrate of 200 m3/h of an average single family house air handling unit. The results obtained revealed complex air cleaning system may be advantageous with respect to material consumption, but emerges as less friendly from the energy consumption perspective. The air cleaning must be including to ecoefficiency calculations of the entire ventilation system of low energy buildings.