Ventilation performance of multi-room in residential building with the proposed novel mechanical ventilation system: A case study

Poor indoor air quality in residential buildings always threatens human health, such as sick building syndrome (SBS), respiratory diseases and low sleep quality. Although fresh air can dilute the concentration of air pollution, the widely used natural ventilation is uncontrolled and its ventilation rate is usually insufficient. Even in the indoor environments of residential buildings where the mechanical ventilation system is installed, different forms of ventilation systems have their unique problems. To create a healthy indoor environment, this investigation proposed a novel push-relay-pull mechanical ventilation system (fresh air supplying system) achieved by combining the mechanical air supply system (push), intermediate relay system (relay) and mechanical exhaust system (pull). This investigation further quantitatively evaluated the performance of the proposed system by comparing it with the traditional mechanical fresh air ventilation system using the age of air, infection risk and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration indexes. The proposed system only needs to install one set of ducts as the traditional mechanical ventilation systems. It can ensure that all rooms would maintain good air quality, and also prevent the spread of pollutants, reduce the average infection risk of people inside a residential building and are conducive to epidemic prevention and control.