CAREER: Mass Transfer Modeling of Volatile Organic Emissions from Building Materials

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9624488 Little This is an award to support research to be conducted by this investigator on factors that influence the quality of indoor air as affected by building materials that are the potential source of volatile organic compounds of pollutional significance. The investigator plans on developing fundamentally-based, mass-transfer models for three generic classes of building materials and evaluate procedures that can be used to evaluate the quality of the parameters that can be used in those models. Methods he plans to use include screening measurements for sample selection, formulation of mechanistic mass-transfer models, solutions involving analytical and numerical methods, dynamic microbalance experiments to determine diffusion and partition coefficients and limited, large-scale chamber validation procedures for the models devised during his research. The research proposed is expected to provide a sound theoretical foundation for the characterization of a wide range of building materials as sources of volatile organic carbon compounds. The models that are an expected product of this research may prove to be especially useful in reducing the number of costly and time- consuming studies of materials conducted in test-chambers. The proposal leading to this award was submitted in response to NSF 95- 118, Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Guidelines for Submission of Proposals. As such, it not only addressed the proposed research but related the investigator's career development plan to the current state of knowledge in the field and of the potential impact work supported under this award would result in educational innovation and effective teaching in the investigator's discipline.