Field investigation of pollutant characteristics and targeted ventilation control strategies in high-ceiling aircraft spraying workshop

To achieve efficient ventilation and purification in the high-ceiling painting workshop is faced with the contradiction between effect and energy consumption. Understanding the characteristics of gaseous pollutants is of paramount importance for ventilation and purification system design. The composition and concentration of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from aircraft painting workshop were sampled by Tenax-TA tubes and analyzed with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Approximately 50 types of VOCs (detection rate>50%) were detected in the aircraft spraying workshop, with percentages of 36.3% for esters, 31.9% for aldehyde ketones, 28.5% for biphenylenes, 1.9% for alcohols and 1.4% for alkanes. The TVOC concentrations in the workshop were 48.6 mg/m3 and 132.4 mg/m3, during the varnish painting and the finish painting processes, respectively, and these are several times higher than those observed in other industries (automobile painting and wooden furniture painting). The field test data of spraying workshops from 197 spraying factories in five industry sectors were collected from field measurement and existing literature. Some VOCs components are the general pollutants in the painting workshops, such as Acetic acid, butyl ester, Toluene, and 2-Butanone. A novel ventilation model using multiple target purification units is proposed to eliminate the pollutants in an aircraft spraying workshop. Compared with the original trench exhaust system, the air volume of the proposed targeted ventilation system is reduced by 75%, and the energy consumption is reduced by 45,000 kW·h per aircraft.