The effects of outdoor air supply rate in an office on perceived air quality, sick building syndrome (SBS) symptoms and productivity.
By P. Wargocki, D. Wyon, J. Sundell, G. Clausen, P. Fanger. Indoor Air: International Journal of Indoor Environment and Health, 2000
746 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Perceived air quality, Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) symptoms and productivity were studied in a normally furnished office space (108 m3) ventilated with an outdoor airflow of 3, 10 or 30 L/s per person, corresponding to an air change rate of 0.6, 2 or 6 h-1. The temperature of 22 degrees C, the relative humidity of 40% and all other environmental parameters remained unchanged. Five groups of six female subjects were each exposed to the three ventilation rates, one group and one ventilation rate at a time. Each exposure lasted 4.6 h and took place in the afternoon. Subjects were unaware of the intervention and remained thermally neutral by adjusting their clothing. They assessed perceived air quality and SBS symptoms at intervals, and performed simulated normal office work. Increasing ventilation decreased the percentage of subjects dissatisfied with the air quality (P < 0.002) and the intensity of odour (P < 0.02), and increased the perceived freshness of air (P < 0.05). It also decreased the sensation of dryness of mouth and throat (P < 0.0006), eased difficulty in thinking clearly (P < 0.001) and made subjects feel generally better (P < 0.0001). The performance of four simulated office tasks improved monotonically with increasing ventilation rates, and the effect reached formal significance in the case of text-typing (P < 0.03). For each two-fold increase in ventilation rate, performance improved on average by 1.7%. This study shows the benefits for health, comfort and productivity of ventilation at rates well above the minimum levels prescribed in existing standards and guidelines. It confirms the results of a previous study in the same office when the indoor air quality was improved by decreasing the pollution load while the ventilation remained unchanged.
Subfields: Building and Construction, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Speech and Hearing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e4c17f2d8eca1d4b36e74e814dc30930b9e6410
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In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
Citations in the corpus
- Do indoor pollutants and thermal conditions in schools influence student performance? A critical review of the literature. (2005, background): “Wargocki et al. (2000) reported that performance of four simulated office tasks improved monotonically with increasing ventilation rates, with a statistically significant trend for text typing (p<0.03), and similar patterns but larger p-values for addition (p<0.06) and proof-reading (p<0.16).”
- The Economic Benefits of Green Buildings: A Comprehensive Case Study (2006, background): “For example, Wargocki et al. (2000) report that as the ventilation rate increases, perceived air quality and productivity improves while the intensity of SBS symptoms decrease.”
- Simultaneous effects of irrelevant speech, temperature and ventilation rate on performance and satisfaction in open-plan offices ☆ (2015, neutral): “In previous studies (Park & Yoon, 2011; Wargocki et al., 1999, 2000) the number of typed characters has been found to decrease with high material emissions in a similar text typing task while no significant difference has been observed in typing errors.”
- Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments (2015, neutral): “…building factors, such as ventilation rate; workspace factors, such as the presence of chemical-emitting materials; and personal factors, such as job stress, allergies, and sex (Mendell 1993; Wargocki et al. 2000; Bornehag et al. 2005; Hedge 2009; Hedge and Gaygen 2010; Nishihara et al. 2014).”