The application of the three (3) photo-paints in Demo-Houses prototype demonstrator aims to estimate their effectiveness to degrade air pollutants as well as to eliminate energy consumption and promote the most promising one to be used in the real scale application of the Hellenic Naval Academy (HNA).
The two demo houses are located on the premises of FORTH in Crete and comprise a unique European facility. The semi-industrial photo paints will be applied on the surface of 1x1m panes such as gypsum board, for the performance of real time measurements in the Demo-Houses. The interior area of the Demo-House where the up-scale panels will be applied is 9m2 (ceiling and walls) and approx. 1,5 kg of phot-paint will be used. The upscale coating panels will be placed in one of the Demo-Houses, the so called “Green House”. The other one will be considered as reference: the “Conventional House”. The two houses are separated by a control room, where the NCSRD’s monitoring equipment (NOx, O3 and BTEX analysers) will be placed.
Both houses (Green and Conventional) will be equipped as follows: Monitoring equipment coupled with data loggers will continuously record concentration of NOx, O3 and VOCs, temperature, RH%, and light intensity inside each “house”. Houses will be fed by air pollutants in order to achieve the required pollution level (close to real indoor conditions). By activating the photocatalytic building material (turn on the light), the pollution level in the “Green House” is estimated to be reduced comparing with the conventional one. All side effects (absorption on walls, photolysis, photocatalysis etc will be also estimated. Hence, the feasibility of the photocatalytic building materials to reduce the air pollutants introduced in the Demo-House indoor environment will be estimated through the comparison of the air quality levels and energy consumption in the two “houses”, in correlation to thermal comfort which is strongly related to the health and well-being of the occupants.