Development of an air duct damper to prevent backflow odor from the ventilation shaft in buildings

Abstract

Nowadays, backflow odor, along with floor noise, has been recognized as an environmental right dispute element between the units within a multi-unit dwelling in Korea because it causes not only foul odors flowing back into the unit vent pipe to flow indoors and cause a problem of degraded air quality but also annoyance by foul odors and steam in balconies and bathrooms. Therefore, this study relates to the performance improvement of bathroom air duct facilities in multi-unit dwellings. This study aims to develop an automatic backflow preventive damper capable of reducing the air leakage rate in comparison to conventional air duct dampers and verify the backflow blocking performance of the automatic backflow preventive damper. As a result, unlike the existing damper, where air in the space assumed a bathroom was foggy because of the large amount of air leakage, the dry ice gas did not flow backwards to the bathroom in the space, where the automatic backflow preventive damper was applied. In addition, it was verified that the automatic backflow preventive damper had an excellent air leakage blocking performance of 98.6% compared to the air leakage blocking performance (80%) of the existing damper.