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Review of 'The causes of air movement in hidden indoor micro-environments: measurements in historic bookshelves'

Reviewer: FERNANDO SARCE

Inviter role(s): EDITOR, USER

Publication date of review: 2022-08-02

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FERNANDO SARCE4

The causes of air movement in hidden indoor micro-environments: measurements in historic bookshelvesCrossref ScienceOpen

There is a clear approach to understand air movement due to indoor environmental conditions.

Average rating:	    Rated 4 of 5.
Level of importance:	    Rated 5 of 5.
Level of validity:	    Rated 3 of 5.
Level of completeness:	    Rated 3 of 5.
Level of comprehensibility:	    Rated 4 of 5.
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The causes of air movement in hidden indoor micro-environments: measurements in historic bookshelves

Morena Ferreira, Josep Grau-Bové, Héctor Altamirano … (2022)

The use of ventilation holes in small micro-environments has been proposed as a mechanism to improve the environmental conditions of moisture and temperature within bookshelves. The National Trust, for example, has used these mechanisms to encourage air movement behind books as a possible strategy to reduce the risk of mould growth. It is believed that including ventilation holes as a passive design solution to promote airflow within micro-environments could prevent decay from occurring in archives of historic buildings. This paper investigates the mechanisms that cause airflow behind bookshelves using field measurements in three National Trust historical libraries. The measurements indicate that small but measurable velocities, up to 4 cm/s, can be generated passively behind bookshelves. Air movement in such confined micro-environments is caused by a combination of natural convection, caused by temperature differences between the interior and the exterior of the bookshelf(stack effect), and forced convection due to drafts in the surrounding environment. While in some cases one mechanism prevailed, both mechanisms may be present simultaneously in most cases. Finally, this paper proposes that air movement as a result of the stack effect in these micro-environments can be predicted with a simple mathematical model, which offers a good fit with the experimental data in the cases where temperature differences promote air motion.

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Review information

DOI:: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-ENG.AXXEIZ.v1.RCTSMZ

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This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com.

ScienceOpen disciplines: Engineering,Architecture

Keywords: Preventive conservation,Historic buildings,Built environment,Micro-environment,Air movement,Mould

Review text

1. At the abstract, it has been stated that "the use of ventilation holes in small micro-environments has been proposed as a mechanism to improve the environmental conditions of moisture and temperature within bookshelves". However, this has not been discussed on the results nor on the conclusions.

2. The stack effect is a natural thermodynamic phenomena, but how this related to the improvement of the "moisture excess" that you would like to partially eliminate? This would be a valuable research statement for your research.

3. Please refer as indoor/ outdoor environmental conditions. Indoor air relative humidity or indoor air pressure, etc.

4. Are you interested on the air motion to then determine an effective way to estimate a mass air flow rate (to dilute the presence of excessive moisture) depending on the air psychrometric conditions? In this case, is your contribution aimed to complement the current understanding on temperature and humidity modelling simulations?

5. Please explain why have you selected those heights for the anemometers locations. What is the rationale behind? It should be clear at the introduction of section 2.1.

6. Improve the quality of Figure 3. The data lines are difficult to see.

7. Please refers as air pressure in your hypothesis stated in Section 3.2.

8. Is it possible that air leakage on the window's frame could affect air speed together with some of the indoor/ outdoor openings in the buildings? If yes, can this be introduced in your methodology or for further research?

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FERNANDO SARCE wrote:

2022-08-02 02:59 UTC

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Version and Review History

Preprint version 2

Reviewed by Lars Gunnarsen

Preprint version 1

Reviewed by Lars Gunnarsen Reviewed by FERNANDO SARCE