An Assessment of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in Foundry Laboratory

EasyChair Preprint 6800

Abstract

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is an important element for a healthy working environment. Working in poor IAQ can lead to sick building syndrome (SBS) with symptoms and troublesome to concentrate in delivering the task. In this study, a preliminary IAQ investigation was carried out at a teaching foundry facility of a higher learning institution in Malaysia. The foundry processes are known to discharge pollutants and gasses. Therefore, this assessment was used to investigate the existence of harmful gasses including Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Carbon Monoxide (CO), particulate matter (PM), and volatile organic compounds (VOC) throughout the complete foundry process cycle. An advanced environmental monitor kit was used to monitor the air quality at three different locations within the foundry space to get a good distribution of data. The results reveal that only CO2 and PM10 traces were detected with the reading is still within the allowable range based on guidelines from the Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH), Malaysia. As for thermal comfort result, the Temperature and Relative Humidity was found to exceeds the benchmark value. Therefore, a more comprehensive and detailed thermal comfort study should be conducted to validate the current finding and an appropriate mitigation strategy must be put in place to ensure the thermal comfort of the occupants during the teaching and learning process in the foundry can be improved.

Keyphrases: Foundry Laboratory, Indoor Air Quality, Pollutants and Gasses, thermal comfort

@booklet{EasyChair:6800,
  author    = {Amirul Abd Rashid and Affan Ezra Azmi and Azli Razak},
  title     = {An Assessment of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in Foundry Laboratory},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 6800},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}