Colorado State University atmospheric chemist Delphine Farmer had spent her entire career probing the complexities of outdoor air – how gases and particles in the atmosphere move, interact and change, and how human activities perturb the air we breathe. Then, she went inside.
Colorado State University atmospheric chemist Delphine Farmer had spent her entire career probing the complexities of outdoor air – how gases and particles in the atmosphere move, interact and change, and how human activities perturb the air we breathe. Then, she went inside.
That is, the Department of Chemistry associate professor turned her attention to the less-studied realm of indoor air. And she’s come to discover that the chemistry inside can be vastly more complex than that of outdoor air systems.
More than two years ago, Farmer and over 60 collaborators from 13 universities set in motion a first-of-its-kind experiment attempting to map the airborne chemistry of a typical home, subjected to typical home activities like cooking and cleaning. The effort was dubbed HOMEChem – House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry – and was led by Farmer and Marina Vance, a mechanical engineer at University of Colorado Boulder.
Now, as the team sifts through the reams of data they collected, Farmer and her CSU research team have published their first major study from HOMEChem. The paper, appearing in Environmental Science and Technology, reports what they learned about chemical reactions that occurred while mopping floors with a common bleach solution.
Read more at Colorado State University
Image: HOMEChem lead researcher Delphine Farmer, right, and graduate student Erin Boedicker, look at a droplet-measurement instrument. (Credit: Callie Richmond)
