Indoor Particulate Matter And How to Limit Your Exposure
By Julia Bakker-Arkema and Marina Vance. This video was entered in the 2019 AAAR conference video competition and won 1st prize! Congratulations to Julia and Nina. We see and experience particulate matter, or aerosol particles, all around us. Aerosol particles make up the smog we see on our morning commutes, the trails of smoke that rise […]
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Ozone: Friend or Foe?
By Julia Bakker-Arkema and Marina Vance. When we think of “ozone”, many of us think about the hole in the ozone layer, located high up in the stratosphere—about 12 kilometers, or 7 miles above the earth’s surface. It’s much higher than Mount Everest and most types of clouds. The ozone layer is important because […]
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The ARTISTIC Field Campaign: an interview with Demetrios Pagonis
One of the biggest conclusions from the ARTISTIC campaign is how much people and our indoor activities impact indoor air quality, from the emissions on our breath, the emissions that come from our activities and the chemical products that we use; these things all change the chemistry of indoor spaces.
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3D printers and air pollution
Breathing in these large amounts of very small particles may lead to effects in our respiratory system. These particles are so small that they can cross over to the blood stream and reach other organs.
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Cleaning floors with bleach significantly alters indoor air chemistry
“When we wash with bleach, the oxidation occurs not only on the surface we are washing but everywhere else too”. Carslaw agrees, adding that bleach washing produces a much “wider group of chemicals than previously thought”, and that “chemists need to work much more closely with toxicologists” in order to determine the health impacts of the resulting, chemically-altered air.
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How dampness in homes impacts indoor air pollution
US researchers are exploring to what degree dampness in homes alters the chemistry and composition of the indoor air. The chemicals formed on wet indoor surfaces could be partially responsible for the increased respiratory symptoms seen in damp homes, an effect that has never been fully explained by mold and mildew.
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A Model Life
Carslaw furthers our knowledge by working with postdoc, Magdalena Kruza and PhD student, Zixu Wang, to use and develop her detailed chemical model with 31,000 lines of code, to simulate the chemistry of indoor air in exquisite detail.
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Why is indoor air chemistry important?
If you’re like the typical human, you likely spend about 90% of your time inside. Our homes, businesses, exercise facilities, cars, and gathering places are all examples of indoor environments where we’re constantly breathing the air. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the chemistry occurring in these spaces and what it means to our health and well-being.
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Humans Identified as the Largest Source of Volatile Organic Chemicals in Indoor Air
US researchers found that people and their possessions directly emitted 57% of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) they measured in the air of a university lecture theatre. We spend approximately 90% of our life inside, where concentrations of VOCs are consistently found to be much higher than in outdoor air. This research is one of the first few to detail the important role that emissions from direct human occupancy plays here.
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