Characterizing airborne fungal and bacterial concentrations and emission rates in six occupied children's classrooms

Baseline information on size-resolved bacterial, fungal, and particulate matter (PM) indoor air concentrations and emission rates is presented for six school classrooms sampled in four countries. Human occupancy resulted in significantly elevated airborne bacterial (81 times on average), fungal (15 times), and PM mass (nine times) concentrations as compared to vacant conditions. Occupied indoor/outdoor (I/O) ratios consistently exceeded vacant I/O ratios. Regarding size distributions, average room-occupied bacterial, fungal, and PM geometric mean particle sizes were similar to one another while geometric means estimated for bacteria, fungi, and PM mass during vacant sampling were consistently lower than when occupied. Occupancy also resulted in elevated indoor bacterial-to-PM mass-based and number-based ratios above corresponding outdoor levels. Mean emission rates due to human occupancy were 14 million cells/person/h for bacteria, 14 million spore equivalents/person/h for fungi, and 22 mg/person/h for PM mass. Across all locations, indoor emissions contributed 83 ± 27% (bacteria), 66 ± 19% (fungi), and 83 ± 24% (PM mass) of the average indoor air concentrations during occupied times. © 2015 John Wile

Thermo-Chemical Modelling Strategies for the Pultrusion Process

In the present study, three dimensional (3D) numerical modeling strategies of a thermosetting pultrusion process are investigated considering both transient and steady state approaches. For the transient solution, an unconditionally stable alternating direction implicit Douglas-Gunn (ADI-DG) scheme is implemented as a first contribution of its kind in this specific field of application. The corresponding results are compared with the results obtained from the transient fully implicit scheme, the straightforward extension of the 2D ADI and the steady state approach. The implementation of the proposed approach is described in detail. The calculated temperature and cure degree profiles at steady state are found to agree well with results obtained from similar analyses in the literature. Detailed case studies are carried out investigating the computational accuracy and the efficiency of the 3D ADI-DG solver. It is found that the steady state approach is much faster than the transient approach in terms of the computational time and the number of iteration loops to obtain converged results for reaching the steady state. Hence, it is highly suitable for automatic process optimization which often involves many design evaluations. On the other hand sometimes the transient regime may be of interest and here the proposed ADI-DG method shows to be considerably faster than the transient fully implicit method which is generally used by the general purpose commercial finite element solvers. Finally, using the proposed steady-state approach, a design of experiments is carried out for the curing characteristic of the product based on pulling speed and part thicknes