Description

Proper assessment of the potential impact of chemical, biological, or radiological events is a necessary component in building risk assessment. Quantifiable measures of risks are particularly important when evaluating control or remediation measures since it is likely that some events cannot be prevented and only the results can be mitigated. Many available risk assessment methodologies are wholly qualitative and lack the necessary connection to a specific building necessary to assess the protective qualities of any particular system configuration. Therefore, buildingspecific quantitative or semi-quantitative methods are needed which require reliable performance measures to determine the severity of health consequences of an event on building occupants. Building performance measures can be categorized as vulnerability-based and threat-based. Threatbased measures refer to the consequences of a particular event: e.g. a release of a specific agent. These measures can provide absolute severity levels (i.e. numbers of casualties or infections) that the event has upon building occupants. Alternatively, vulnerability-based metrics evaluate the impact of an event in terms that are not specific to a particulate agent, but may be relative to a baseline. A threat-based approach is undertaken here, in which multizone airflow modeling is used to simulate the spread of Bacillus anthracis after a release. The contaminant transport simulation is coupled with the appropriate epidemiological methodology to model the impact of the agent upon the building’s occupants and produce a threatbased measure of event impact. While the approach is not without limitations, the threat-based assessment compares favorably with vulnerabilitybasedmetrics as long as sensitivity and uncertainty are properly addressed.

Citation: ASHRAE Papers CD: 2014 ASHRAE Winter Conference, New York, NY

Product Details

Published:

2014

Number of Pages:

8

File Size:

1 file , 2.4 MB

Product Code(s):

D-NY-14-C035