Development of a chemical transport model to estimate chemical transport from the subsurface environments into indoor air spaces.

Indoor air polution is extremely important in terms of a person’s overall health. There are many sources of indoor air pollution, but one that is too often overlooked is the transport of subsurface vapors into indoor air spaces (i.e. vapor intrusion). Classic vapor intrusion modeling approaches, although extensively used and published, ignore the physics of airflow around and within a building. Modeling airflow around a bluff body has been used extensively in atmospheric modeling of buildings. And, indoor air models have also been extensively studied. However, current vapor intrusion models do not account for these processes and therefore existing vapor intrusion models are lacking a critical theoretical framework for accurately capturing the vapor intrusion problem. This project will couple aboveground air transport models with subsurface transport models and develop a more comprehensive vapor intrusion model.

Methods and Software:

Our model will be developed using the Comsol Multiphysics Comsol previously FemLab computation fluid dynamics CFD software package. The PI (Pennell) currently has two active Comsol licenses at the University of Kentucky. If necessary we may also employ ANSYS Fluent. In addition to these CFD packages, we will also incorporate MATLAB into our simulations.

Funding:

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Students:

Elham Shirazi (PhD student)
Mohammadyousef Amir Roghani (PhD Student)

Publications: