Gaseous Pollutent Source Term Estimation Based on Adjoint Probability and Regularization Method

College of Urban Construction, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 211899, China

^* Corresponding author: faylee@njtech.edu.cn

Abstract

Fast and accurate identification of source locations and release rates is particularly important for improving indoor air quality and ensuring the safety and health of people. Existing methods based on adjoint probability are difficult to distinguish the release rate of dynamic sources, and optimization algorithms based on regularization are limited to analysing only a small amount of potential pollutant source information. Therefore, this study proposed an algorithm combining adjoint equations and regularization models to identify the location and release intensity of pollutant sources in the entire computational domain of a room. Based on the validated indoor CFD computational model, we first obtained a series of response matrices corresponding to the sensor position by solving the adjoint equation, and then used the regularization method and Bayesian inference to extrapolate the release rate and location of dynamic pollutant source in the room. The results shown that the proposed algorithm is convenient and feasible to identify the location and intensity of the indoor pollutant source. Compared with the real source intensity, the identification of constant source intensity is lower than the error threshold (10%) in 97.4% of the time nodes, and the identification of periodic source is lower than the error threshold (10%) in 95.4% of the time nodes. This research provides a new method and perspective for the estimation of indoor pollutant source information.