History source identification of airborne pollutant dispersions in a slot ventilated building enclosure

The backward time modeling of diffusion-convection pollutant dispersions has been developed with quasi-reversibility method in this work. The procedure is applied to the backward time identification of the contaminant release history and source location in a three-dimensional slot ventilated building enclosure. Spatial distributions of pollutant concentrations are known in priori. The effects of supplying air velocity, pollutant source location, pollutant diffusivity property, and pollutant release time on the accuracy of the pollutant dispersion history recovery have been investigated. Numerical results demonstrate that the accuracy of the pollutant dispersion history recovery can be enhanced with different approaches and measures, including the promotion of room ventilation rate, the shrinkage of distance between the pollutant source and supplying air port, and the reduction of pollutant diffusivity. The facilitated implementations of boundary conditions and the improved generality of quasi-reversibility methods make the pollutant source history identifications of less computational efforts. Particularly, the good agreement of the backward time identified source location with the true situation fully shows that quasi-reversibility method is more competitive in the engineering applications involving with convective fluid flows.