The PHARAON project: new bases for a transverse standard to assess indoor air mitigation
Résumé
The indoor air treatment market has evolved significantly over the past 10 years, moving from treatment to remediation. Performance criteria have to be reconsidered to face the diversification of technologies (active or passive; destructive or not) and the evolutions of practices Are existing evaluation protocols still suitable? Actually, they do not allow the assessment and comparison of any commercial remediation solutions and do not integrate the diversity of pollutants of indoor environments. To make public authorities and consumers aware, it is necessary: (i) to quantify the performances of any remediation solution, whatever the technology, (ii) to compare the devices between them, and regarding air renewal rate, and (iii) to align the effective contribution to IAQ where they are placed and whatever the remediation approach.The PHARAON project has been launched in France in 2023 with the support of French Environmental Agency. It promotes a transdisciplinary approach to provide an integrative evaluation protocol of remediation solutions. The final goal of that project is to move forward and unify air treatment standards. The innovation point of this work relies in the fact that the experimental protocol will apply to standalone device as well as sorptive walls, or ventilation and airing. This work aims at presenting the first three aspects of the project: (i) definition and justification of model pollutants of interest including gas, particulate matter and biological aerosol, (ii) description of a typical pollution scenario, and (iii) introduction of metrics of interest to assess the performance of remediation solutions.