UT Tyler Engineers Hope To Clean Up Air By BRIAN PEARSON   |   May 31, 2009

A nearby machine purrs as Torey Nalbone, associate civil engineering professor, explains its purpose in great detail.

In a lab on the University of Texas at Tyler campus, Nalbone and his machine analyze the unseen, potentially nasty nanoparticles that can emerge from everyday household and business items and perhaps cause an array of health problems, including cancer.

The work is for the Texas Allergy, Indoor Environment and Energy Institute, or TxAIRE, a collaborative grant project with UT partners in Dallas, Austin, Tyler's health science center and industrial partners.

The objective: to pinpoint indoor air pollutants and develop technology to minimize them.

From an economic development standpoint, Tyler area air conditioning manufacturers Carrier and Trane could benefit from being at the forefront of developing and producing units that sweep the air of unhealthy particles.

From a home-building standpoint, it could mean constructing houses so that more fresh air from the outside makes its way inside.

For commercial purposes, it could mean businesses scrambling to improve air quality and ventilation to avoid legal actions from employees claiming that what they breathed on the job made them sick.

In the biggest of all pictures, the cleaner air could reduce worker absences -- and employer health costs.

TxAIRE, funded through a state grant, recently completed its 2-year-old first phase, conducting asthma surveys of about 2,500 families in the Tyler area, said James Nelson Jr., dean of UT-Tyler engineering and computer science.

Preliminary survey results indicate that homes today are built so solidly to maximize energy efficiency that they could be restricting fresh-air flow, Nelson said.

"We're just moving indoor air around," he said, adding that this might mean that everyday household pollutants are trapped and build up, a possible cause of asthma and other illnesses.

Although 80 percent of TxAIRE's work focuses on households, the same problems might be found in office buildings, where often the only thing introducing fresh air to upper floors are elevators, Nelson said.

Nalbone said some of the TxAIRE project will test for ozone, a colorless gas which can damage living tissue.

"We know ozone is not only generated outdoors, but it also is generated by appliances indoors inside the house," Nalbone said. "Ozone is a very severe upper respiratory irritant."

Harold Doty, UT-Tyler dean of business and technology, which is handling the marketing and business-liaison end of TxAIRE, said the project could shed light on the insulation, paint, carpeting, tile glue and even appliances in a household, all of which can emit pollutants. Studies like this one also could mean big changes for commercial spaces, he said.

"It's going to mean some product redesign, retrofitting and re-engineering commercial office space," Doty said.

Nelson said the project's heady two-pronged objective would be to not only reduce suspected pollutants but improve energy efficiency.

Armed with a $3.75 million grant in 2007 from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, UT-Tyler researchers set out to learn more about why, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. asthma cases have doubled in the past two decades. About 5 percent of the U.S. population has asthma, with the highest proportion among children ages 5 to 14.

Leading the project is TxAIRE executive director Jan Sundell, who has studied indoor air quality and asthma for 20 years in Sweden, Bulgaria, Taiwan, Singapore and other countries.

TxAIRE's first phase involved the survey, while the second will entail using devices to study the air in 400 respondents' homes -- 200 with asthma problems and another 200 without.

Nelson said the third phase will involve building residential labs where home designs, products and equipment can be tested on actual families to determine health benefits.

Findings eventually could lead to improvements in AC filtration devices and sensors used in the operation of residential heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems.

Nelson said the study has reached its halfway point timewise, although it could take 10 years before the results manifest themselves in changes in homes and businesses.

He predicted businesses would be the first to develop healthier air for their work environments.
The motivation would come from fewer employee illnesses and avoiding costly litigation from workers who say their jobs made them ill, he said. He added that agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency are doing their own study of work environments.

Doty said TxAIRE study results could be used to help local companies such as Trane and Carrier to develop new products.

"We need to think about how we can drive the economic development," he said.

Dennis Thoren, Trane's engineering and technology vice president, said TxAIRE provides "a great opportunity to better understand the health effects and benefits of effective clean air technologies applied in a typical home environment."

"Trane and the (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) industry will benefit from continued scientific research in this area by continuing the education process using scientific data to help the public understand the benefit of high-efficiency air cleaning systems � " Thoren said.

"This research will also provide important insights that can be used to better understand how these air cleaning systems might be further improved to provide enhanced health and quality of life benefits."

He pointed to Trane's CleanEffects home air-cleaning system as a step in the new direction.

"Today, Trane has the highest efficiency and most effective whole house air cleaning systems in the market, and we plan to continue to lead in this area of technology," Thoren said. "A key future area of interest in the TxAIRE program is to extend our understanding of energy management and how we connect the development and application of highly energy efficient HVAC systems with whole house air filtration systems to provide the ultimate in safety, comfort and efficiency."