Monitoring of air ducting using mechanical robot for indoor air quality (IAQ) improvement

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) has become public concern recently. Air ducting is used in Mechanical Ventilation and Air Conditioning (MVAC) system to deliver air to the building occupants. Without proper maintenance of the ducting system, it will affect the IAQ of overall building. Monitoring air d...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Muhamad Damanhuri, Amir Abdullah
Format: Thesis
Language:English
English
English
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://eprints.uthm.edu.my/1889/1/24p%20AMIR%20ABDULLAH%20MUHAMAD%20DAMANHURI.pdf
http://eprints.uthm.edu.my/1889/2/AMIR%20ABDULLAH%20MUHAMAD%20DAMANHURI%20COPYRIGHT%20DECLARATION.pdf
http://eprints.uthm.edu.my/1889/3/AMIR%20ABDULLAH%20MUHAMAD%20DAMANHURI%20WATERMARK.pdf
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Summary:Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) has become public concern recently. Air ducting is used in Mechanical Ventilation and Air Conditioning (MVAC) system to deliver air to the building occupants. Without proper maintenance of the ducting system, it will affect the IAQ of overall building. Monitoring air ducting is the preliminary step to get real view inside the ducting. This study focused on the development of the Mechanical Ducting Robot (MerDuct) to monitor the ducting and data collection at real time (in�situ). The developments of the MerDuct have been performed in three phases. MerDuct were controlled wirelessly, and equipped with lamp and camera to get real visual inside the ducting. Case studies were visually performed suing MerDuct in three different scenarios namely full operation ducting, second is seldom operation ducting and third is abandoned ducting. Three case studies had been conducted in Block A4 Academic Office Building UTHM, Local Exhaust Ventilation (LEV) at Thermal Environmental Laboratory UTHM, and Building Services Laboratory Block E6, Faculty of Engineering Technology UTHM respectively. MerDuct was designed to be able travel to the various ranges along the ducting and using analog joystick to make it user friendly .The seldom operation of ducting was clearly shows clean ducting without any trapped dust and web since the LEV was only used once a week and it is only less than 1 year old. The other two scenarios clearly showed trapped dust and web from photo captured by MerDuct. From the experimental data, MerDuct was successfully performed as monitoring robot to detect Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) problem source. The image taken by MerDuct could help building owner to predict necessary time to perform the duct cleaning to improve the IAQ based on occupational safety and health for sustainable development.