IAQ: plugging our knowledge gaps

Description:
We spend most of out time indoors, and since Covid we all have become more aware of our exposure to pollutants of all types: particles, gases, VOCs, viruses and other biological toxins.
Indoor air quality (IAQ) has been a concern for many decades, but we were not providing good quality data: the sensing technology was adequate for only a few pollutants, we were not able to identify the critical VOCs, the dangers from particles was underestimated and the role of ventilation on IAQ was appreciated by only a few.
Air quality is a rapidly growing market, measuring urban air pollution with low cost sensors (LCS). Over the last decade LCs’s have improved significantly, data analysis has benefitted from machine learning and wireless communication is ubiquitous. Standards are being written to ensure good data quality, WHO guidelines and limit values are in place, and legislation is being written to protect us in public spaces. But indoor air is not the same as outdoor air. There are more VOCs, different oxidant and particle concentrations, with ventilation determining our exposure. Standards and guidelines lag behind the efforts with outdoor air.
New cross-discipline studies such as HOMEChem and INDAIRPOLLNET have shed light and clarified what are the critical pollutants, their sources and their detailed chemistry. We will discuss progress in our knowledge, sensor and sensor system advances and what we need to know, identifying the gaps. This presentation will focus on particle monitoring, VOC chemistry, pollutants from indoor activities and ventilation management.

Speaker: John Saffell - NosmoTech Ltd.
John Saffell is a Director of NosmoTech Ltd, based in Cambridge UK. NosmoTech invests in startups and develops air quality instrumentation and healthcare diagnostics. He was co-founder in 1997 and CTO of Alphasense Ltd. until 2021. John sits on standards committees in both Europe and USA, writing performance standards for industrial safety and air quality. He is chairman of the UK trade association for gas detection: the Council of Gas Detection and Environmental Monitoring (CoGDEM) John has a BSc in Chemistry from MIT and a PhD in Materials Science from University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of the Institute of Measurement and Control.