A study on the application of sorptive building materials to reduce the concentration and volume of contaminants inhaled by occupants in office areas

• Sorptive building material is one of the effective methods for improving IAQ.
• The air pollutant at inhaled area is controlled by using sorptive building materials.
• Indoor environment factors influenced the performance of sorptive building materials.

There has recently been an increase in the use of chemical building materials and airtight composite materials, in an attempt to reduce energy consumption and increase energy efficiency. Accordingly, the incidence rate of harmful diseases such as Sick House Syndrome and Sick Building Syndrome has been increasing. As a way to solve this problem, sorptive building materials (hereafter SBMs) are used to improve the indoor air quality. Thus, studies on the performance of SBMs and the factors influencing them have been conducted through experimental methods particularly in small-scale test chambers. But there are few studies on the reduction of contaminant concentration and occupants’ inhalation rate through the use of SBMs in a real space scale. Therefore, this study analyzed the effect of concentration reduction through the use of SBMs in office areas and examined the concentration reduction by alternative methods through a case study considering the local installation of SBMs using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis. As a result, the indoor air quality was more efficiently improved when SBMs were installed near occupants’ desks, toluene concentration reduction was high relative to the application area.