A Matlab-CONTAM Toolbox for contaminant event monitoring in intelligent buildings

Abstract

An intelligent building should take all the necessary steps to provide protection against the dispersion of contaminants from sources (events) inside the building which can compromise the indoor air quality and influence the occupants' comfort, health, productivity and safety. Multi-zone models and software, such as CONTAM, have been widely used in building environmental studies for predicting airflows and the resulting contaminant transport. This paper describes a developed Matlab Toolbox that allows the creation of data sets from running multiple scenarios using CONTAM by varying the different problem parameters. The Matlab-CONTAM Toolbox is an expandable research tool which facilitates the implementation of various algorithms related to contamination event monitoring. In particular, this paper describes the implementation of state-of-the-art algorithms for detecting and isolating a contaminant source. The use of the Toolbox is demonstrated through a building case-study. The Matlab-CONTAM Toolbox is released under an open-source licence, and is available at https://github.com/KIOS-Research/matlab-contam-toolbox.