IRINA (Innovative Room for INdoor Air studies)

The large experimental IRINA room (40 m3) used as the Innovative Room for Indoor Air studies can reproduce real indoor air conditions in a controlled way at a scale of 1:1. The key parameters of its operations have been optimised and validated (pollutant-wall interactions, pollutant blank levels, air flow, pollutant homogenisation). IRINA provides an adjustable air renewal rate between 0.3 and 10 h-1 in order to reproduce a broad typology of indoor environments. It is equipped with devices that can generate gaseous and particulate pollutants to reproduce isolated or ongoing multi-pollutant episodes. In terms of analytical systems, IRINA is equipped with 4 to 10 micro-sensor networks to continuously monitoring the temperature, relative humidity and CO2 content. Several analytical instruments can be coupled to IRINA, including: 3 gas chromatographs (2 compact-GC and 1 ATD-GC-FID+MS), 2 chemical ionisation mass spectrometers (SIFT-MS), 1 formaldehyde specific analyser, 1 ozone analyser, 1 NOx analyser, 1 particle sizer and counter. 

The experimental room can benefit from natural solar radiation or be completely insulated to keep it out. It is also equipped with wind speed sensors for its probes for its wind characterisation and wattmeters to obtain information on the electrical consumption of the equipment it houses. Finally, by 2024 it aims to host a thermal instrumented manikin to assess the thermal comfort of occupants and their exposure to pollutants.

IRINA is therefore a 1:1 scale device aimed at obtaining information on the physico-chemical properties of indoor air and particularly the fate of pollutants. It is particularly well-suited to developing and assessing improvement mechanisms and strategies for IAQ. Finally, the experimental IRINA room provides an interdisciplinary meeting place at the interface of wind studies, heat science and physical chemistry. As such, enables production of experimental data at a 1:1 scale for modelling indoor environments.