EETD Scientists Develop Effective Approaches for Removing VOCs from Indoor Air

Researchers estimate that those of us in developed countries spend 90 percent of our time indoors, which means that most of the time we are breathing air polluted by emissions from indoor sources. Providing more outdoor air ventilation can improve indoor air quality; however, energy is needed to heat, cool, humidify or dehumidify, and sometimes filter the ventilation air brought indoors from outdoors. Studies have shown that about 10 percent of the energy consumed in U.S. commercial buildings is used to thermally condition ventilation air. To improve a building's energy efficiency, we would like to reduce ventilation rates while maintaining good air quality—or better yet, to do so while improving indoor air quality.

Through their work at the Indoor Environment Department of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), William Fisk, Hugo Destaillats, and Meera Sidheswaran are devising solutions to this challenge. Recently, they have been evaluating two ways to reduce indoor air pollutants without increasing ventilation rates: by developing a synthetic catalyst to reduce indoor formaldehyde concentrations, and by evaluating the effectiveness of activated carbon fiber filters in reducing other volatile organic compound (VOC) concentrations.