An Adaptive Indoor Air Quality Control Scheme for Minimizing Volatile Organic Compounds Density

Abstract

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as toluene, xylene, and formaldehyde are commonly found in indoor and the VOCs will yield human health's issue. The compounds are crucial in determining the indoor air quality (IAQ) and hence being how to manage IAQ becomes an important topic. Most human may spend most of time living in poor IAQ environment and it may result in excess life risk to respiratory symptoms and billion US dollars cost annually. VOC degrades IAQ and high VOC density indoor is not uncommon. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Government of Canada provided benchmarks on the harm levels and the benchmarks indicated the potential health risk caused by hazardous substances. In this paper, a new comprehensive control scheme, namely fuzzy genetic multi-layer control scheme (FGMLCS), is designed to manage the IAQ. The multilayer control structure is designed which includes fuzzy logic together with genetic algorithm and multi-objective optimization to give an optimal control for a better IAQ. Q factor is defined based on the 'harm levels' set by the benchmarks to give a unified standard for various VOCs with different 'harm levels'. FGMLCS has achieved VOC density better than the 'harm levels' by over 57%, which is superior to the benchmarks and is able to lower the risk of health deterioration and thus aiding habitant to be less carcinogenic.