Multizone Age-of-Air Analysis

Age of air is a technique for evaluating ventilation that has been actively used for over 20 years. Age of air quantifies the time it takes for an elemental volume of outdoor air to reach a particular location or zone within the indoor environment. Age of air is often also used to quantify the ventilation effectiveness with respect to indoor air quality. In a purely single zone situation this use of age of air is straightforward, but application of age of air techniques in the general multizone environment has not been fully developed. This article looks at expanding those single-zone techniques to the more complicated environment of multizone buildings and in doing so develops further the general concept of age of air. The results of this analysis show that the nominal age of air as often used cannot be directly used for determining ventilation effectiveness unless specific assumptions are made regarding source distributions.