Abstract

In many peoples’ minds, air pollution is associated with the contamination of urban air from automobile exhausts and industrial emissions. Growing number of scientific evidence has indicated that in industrialized societies, air within buildings can be more seriously polluted than the outdoor air. In the last couple of decades, with the widespread availability of personal computers, mathematical modelling has also begun to be used to understand air pollution behaviour and effects on cultural heritages and personal collections kept in museums. This paper foresees an examining of the air quality in museums using mathematical modelling techniques for Indoor Air Quality, IAQ. Two case-studies are carried out in Pardisan Biodiversity Museum and Persian Carpet Museum in Tehran-Iran. The major driving pollutants such as NO, NO2 and SO2 in and outside of the museums have been measured, analysed and the results have been used for modelling purposes. This research focuses on examining a masterwork IAQ model namely IMPACT to compare its ability in estimating concentration of pollutants and the amount of error with real measured concentrations. The results confirm that there is good agreement between predictions made by IMPACT model with real concentrations. This agreement is in the range of 77% to 94%. This paper ends with some recommendations for improving museum’s IAQ management.