Assessment of indoor air quality in a wooden church for preventive conservation

Abstract

Environmental pollution and global warming effects are a particular problem for the protection of historical monuments and heritage objects. More than 1400 wooden churches have been built in Romania until 1918. They form a precious nationally and globally heritage that needs to be preserved and transmitted to future generations. A fist step in this process is the indoor air quality assessment to identify the sources of pollution and potential aggressive compounds with the goal of reducing the effects on wooden structure and heritage objects. The paper presents a case study conducted in 2014 in order to assess the air quality inside a wooden church from Bucharest; the sampling campaigns were conducted inside and outside the building for simultaneously air pollutants (NO2, SO2, CO2, O3, PM2.5 and microflra) and micro-climate factors (temperature, humidity) monitoring using automated methods that allow results storage, statistical treatment and interpretation. In order to identify the pollution sources and their impact on indoor air quality have been used indoor/outdoor (I/O) ratio values and the Pearson correlation which indicated that the major pollution sources are the outdoor air pollution and people attending the church services.