Indoor air quality assessment in the Romanian National Aviation Museum

Abstract

National Museum of Romanian Aviation is the only museum of its kind in the country who holds in a historical succession the evolution of the Romanian aeronautics starting from Traian Vuia and Aurel Vlaicu until today. Documents, models and aircraft exhibited in the museum, many of them being unique, can be irreversibly degraded under the action of chemical air contaminants and/or inadequate microclimate conditions. The article presents the results of air quality assessment within the main exhibition space of the museum, Hangar 1, obtained in a study organized in 2014-2015. Given the specific of the museum and its location, in a city with intense traffic, both indoor and outdoor concentrations of NO2, SO2, CO, O3, PM2.5 and microclimate parameters (temperature and relative humidity) were monitored. Monitoring results showed lower concentrations indoor than outdoor, I/O ratios fits in the interval [0.32; 0.8] except CO with an I/O ratio situated close to the value 1. Averages concentrations were below those recommended by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) for air chemical pollutants measured inside the museum, except ozone concentration whose average is in the hot season slightly above the recommended limit but below the lower intervention limit, 50µg/m3. Microclimate parameter values also fall into a range that implies reduced risk for various objects and books according to ASHRAE; diurnal variations of microclimate parameters do not represent a danger for the exhibits in the museum, also. Analyzing the information obtained by monitoring indoor air quality and statistical interpretation of these data (I/O ratios, diagrams, Spearman correlation analysis) we can say that the air inside Hangar 1 and microclimate conditions provided do not raise major problems for long-term conservation of the exhibits in the museum and do not require additional measures in terms of air quality and microclimate parameters