Characteristics of indoor human-induced particle resuspension under different ventilation conditions

Abstract

This study performed a series of experiments to study the characteristics of human-induced particle resuspension under different ventilation conditions. Four modes of supplied airspeed were evaluated: no wind, low wind (2.742 m/s), medium wind (3.849 m/s) and high wind (4.422 m/s). Results show that the steady-state particle concentration can be approximated as a linear function of the airspeed. Human walking and ventilation conditions can have a significant and coupling role in particle behaviours. In particular, human walking provides initial energy for resuspension by disturbing the local fields, and thus increases the resuspension, especially for large particles of 5–10 μm in size. The wind has two competitive effects, that is, supplying energy to keep particles suspended and pushing the particles downward, and the latter becomes dominant when the airspeed was too high. Consequently, intermediate airspeeds can intensify the effect of human walking, and introduce higher peaks of particle concentration in the human-walking stages. As for the particle number density, similar conclusions can be drawn that the effect of ventilation conditions is more pronounced on small particles less than 1 μm while that of human walking is on large particles. This work lays a foundation for revealing the particle resuspension mechanism.