Empirical Studies Assessing the CO2 Levels in Indoor Spaces

EasyChair Preprint 14298

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to isolate themselves and confine their lives to enclosed spaces to protect themselves from the outbreak and spread of the virus. Contrary to this, recent studies have shown that restricting ventilation in a space can lead to health risks resulting from CO2 build-up from exhaled breath. There have also been a substantial number of multi-disciplinary research studies that have established CO2 exhalation in an enclosed room as a proxy for COVID-19 and other similar variants of viruses. We conducted experiments to understand the Spatio-temporal spread of CO2 inside a car in the hot and dry climate of Jodhpur and a bedroom in the composite climate of New Delhi during the winter season. The experiments were carried out using reference-grade sensors and custom-built devices for indoor use, which measured the ambient temperature, relative humidity, and CO2 levels. On analyzing the findings from our studies, we observed that even seemingly harmless situations, such as an enclosed vehicle and a non-ventilated bedroom space, could lead to harmful levels of CO2 built-up of over nine times and three times over the acceptable threshold of 1000 ppm for a car and a bedroom respectively. Reassessment of the design guidelines underlying environmental ergonomics is advised for automobiles and residential spaces.

Keyphrases: COVID-19, Carbon dioxide (CO2), Environmental ergonomics, ventilation

@booklet{EasyChair:14298,
  author    = {Sonal Gangrade and Bankapalli Vamsi and D Prasannaa Kumar and Saran Raj and Jay Dhariwal},
  title     = {Empirical Studies Assessing the CO2 Levels in Indoor Spaces},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 14298},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}