Identification of indoor contaminant source location by a single concentration sensor

Methods of maximum correlation coefficient (MCC) and the minimum discrete degree (MDD) are developed to identify the location of indoor contaminant source. These two methods are simple, effective, and economic due to the need of only one sensor. The methods are validated by a three-dimensional case study. The effects of the sampling time, the sampling interval, and the sensor response time and measurement error on the location identification of the contaminant source are analyzed. The results indicate that the identification performance of the MDD method is better than that of the MCC method; however, the MDD requires a fast response and high-accuracy sensor. MCC method not only has smaller effects of response time and measurement error compared with the MDD method but it also does not require high-performance (accuracy) sensor and it is not suitable for fast identification in a short time. For source location identification, the two methods need to properly choose sampling time, sampling interval, and response time.