Method to characterize collective impact of factors on indoor air

One of the most important problems in studies of building environment is a description of how it is influenced by various dynamically changing factors. In this paper we characterized the joint impact of a collection of factors on indoor air quality (IAQ). We assumed that the influence is reflected in the temporal variability of IAQ parameters and may be deduced from it. The proposed method utilizes mean square displacement (MSD) analysis which was originally developed for studying the dynamics in various systems. Based on the MSD time-dependence descriptor beta, we distinguished three types of the collective impact of factors on IAQ: retarding, stabilizing and promoting. We presented how the aggregated factors influence the temperature, relative humidity and CO2 concentration, as these parameters are informative for the condition of indoor air. We discovered, that during a model day there are encountered one, two or even three types of influence. The presented method allows us to study the impacts from the perspective of the dynamics of indoor air. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.