A three-stage approach for assessment of outdoor air quality : a facilities management approach

Conventionally Facilities Management (FM) is defined as an integrated approach of maintaining, improving and adapting the buildings of an organisation in order to create an environment that strongly supports the primary objectives of the company. However there is debate as to what FM should or should not embrace. It can mainly be categorised as either hard FM or soft FM. The hard FM includes ‘building management and maintenance’ and soft FM includes ‘management of support services’. Aspects of the built environment including infrastructure facilities such as estate and property belong to the hard FM category. Considering the parts which embrace the hard FM discipline it can be seen that, it has a major role in prevention and remediation of the air pollution related health hazards within the estate. This paper focuses on hard FM, specifically in relation to air pollution and any associated health complaints. FM must assess the link between air pollution and any associated health complaints by investigating three parameters; a site survey, interviews with relevant personal and actual air sampling. A typical environmental investigation will be a combination of walkthrough inspections, staff interviews, and information gathering to assess incidence of symptoms throughout the estate, supplemented by a detailed assessment by skilled personnel that may include air sampling to characterise the pollution profile and its sources within the estate. Sampling techniques are well established, but a sufficient temporal and spatial resolution, on which a decision of the facility manager is based, can not be achieved by this method alone. In this study a three-stage approach has been applied in the quantification of an environmental impact assessment of research infrastructure of Glasgow Caledonian University. It has been shown that this approach, which includes superimposition of spatial distribution of results of questionnaires and physical behaviour of the specific pollutants, can become an essential means for facilities managers to confidently make an appropriate decision. The application of computational fluid dynamics will have significant implications for the scope of FM to make intelligent solutions during the design stage of an estate and also in the ‘occupancy’ stage.