AIR-QUALITY MONITORING AND DETECTION OF AIR CONTAMINATION IN AN ENCLOSED ENVIRONMENT

We report on the development of an air-quality monitoring and early de tection system for an enclosed environment with specific emphasis on m anned spacecraft. The proposed monitoring approach is based on a distr ibuted parameter model of contaminant dispersion and real-time contami nant concentration measurements. Kalman filtering Is identified as a s uitable method for generating on-line estimation of the spatial contam ination profile, and an implicit Kalman filtering algorithm is shown t o be preferable for real-time implementation. The identification of th e contaminant concentration profile allows for a straightforward solut ion of the early detection of an air contamination event and provides information that enables potential automatic diagnosis of an unknown c ontamination source.