There’s not much Corsi, a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering in the College of Engineering, can do to help. An expert on indoor air quality, he can tell you what’s wrong with it and how to make it better, but he can’t clean up the mold. All he can do now is console the woman and point her toward mold remediation help. Corsi has answered a lot of calls like this in the six years he shifted from studying outdoor air. In that time, his lab has become a leader in the study of indoor air quality. Corsi points out that Americans spend an average of 95 percent of their time indoors and in vehicles and just 5 percent out-of-doors. “What’s been shown in this country and in other countries is that the levels of most air pollutants that we heavily regulate outdoors are often higher indoors,” Corsi says. That’s not to say we should put on gas masks when we walk into the house, but there are dangers—especially to infants and young children—that could be reduced. His research looks at three areas that affect indoor air quality: Chemicals given off by household materials such as paint, vinyl composition flooring, carpet and other items; chemical reactions that occur indoors; and human exposure to indoor pollutants.
He’s conducted research in Central Texas homes, schools and his lab at the Pickle Research Campus. In one of their first indoor air projects, Corsi and his team studied emissions of specific chemicals from drinking water. “We concluded in our study that roughly half of the human exposure to these chemicals is coming from inhaling them, not drinking them, because such a large fraction strips out in the indoor air,” he says. That means, he says, that good ventilation around water sources—dishwashers, washing machines and the like—can reduce exposure to chemicals that originate in drinking water by nearly 50 percent. Another study looked at how chemicals react with materials indoors. The materials studied included carpet, paint and even apples. “For some chemicals we found that it could take upwards of a year or more for some surfaces to cleanse themselves after being exposed to the chemical,” he says. Many chemicals like nicotine, for example, remain in carpet and on other materials for at least six months after smoking or other emission sources have ceased in a house. That can be particularly harmful to infants and small children who spend a lot of time playing on the floor.
Such research achieved new import in 2001 when the Hart Senate Building and Brentwood post office in Washington, D.C. were contaminated with anthrax. Problems associated with the contaminations and corresponding building remediations led to a $1.2 million research project awarded to Corsi by the U.S. Department of Defense. To disinfect such buildings, an appropriate disinfectant such as chlorine dioxide has to remain at specific elevated levels in building air for a certain amount of time. But in past remediation efforts, decontamination workers found they needed more disinfectant than predicted. What happened was that much of the disinfectant reacted with indoor surfaces, requiring more disinfectant to be pumped into the buildings. Corsi and his team are studying how disinfectants chemically react with 24 common indoor surfaces and what byproducts are formed by the reactions. “We can also predict what kind of byproducts will form, how long the byproducts will linger in the building, and that will help with plans for reentry to remediated buildings,” he says. “It could be three months, a week or a year. All that information is going into a large database we’re developing.” Tim
Green How to keep indoor air cleanDon’t bring products that are
detrimental—such as ozone
generators—into the house Related SitesRichard
Corsi’s faculty Web site |
