Determination of AER, Ventilation Rate and Indoor Air Quality Index for a Community Kitchen

In recent year’s indoor air quality has gained much attention throughout the globe. It was ranked as the top five risks to public health. People spend most of their time indoors, it might be their home, workplace or while commuting. They are exposed to different micro environments without knowing that they are inhaling substantially high concentrations of different indoor air pollutants (IAPs). In developing countries, IAP concentrations are generally found high due to poor ventilation and numerous indoor sources. Poor IAQ can severely damage the mental, physical and social ability of a person, which can affect the working efficiency and result in loss in overall productivity. The present study focused on the determination of air exchange rate (AER), ventilation rate (VR) Q, and indoor air quality index (IAQI) for the community kitchen. The study was conducted for 3 days from 18-10-2022 to 20-10-2022. In this study, different pollutants like PM10, PM2.5, PM1, TVOCS, CO2, CO, O3, NO2 were studied. Comfort parameters temperature and relative humidity were also monitored. The levels of all the pollutants, comfort parameters were shown higher on 20-10-22 when cooking activities like frying potato, frying fish took place have crossed the WHO guidelines 2009. The AER value varied from 0.9915 to 0.9906 h−1. Lowest value was observed on the highly polluted day i.e. 20-10-2022. Similarly, the VR varied from 0.8262 to 0.8254 lit/s/m2. This VR has shown that buildings have fallen to category III i.e. high polluting buildings according to ventilation rate for non-residential buildings (European Standard, EN 15,251). The indoor air quality index (IAQI) is calculated based on 5 criteria pollutants PM10, PM2.5, CO, O3, NO2 showed that the health condition of the workers falls into the very severe to poor category (NAQI 2014). Further the study suggests the measures to enhance IAQ that can be practiced in the community kitchen which were observed during the study.