CAREER: Characterizing Chemical Emissions and Multiphase Transformations from Personal Care Product Use in Indoor Environments

Personal care products may release chemicals into indoor air during their normal use. These chemicals may stick to surfaces, form small airborne particles, and move through ventilation systems to outdoor air. These processes play affect indoor air quality and its link to outdoor air. However, the basic processes that control how these chemicals are released, changed, and moved inside buildings are not well known. This CAREER project will examine how product usage, heat, and building operations affect chemical behavior indoors. The research will use laboratory tests and full-scale experiments in a residential research test house representative of indoor conditions. The work will also support AI-based models of chemical movement and ventilation control in buildings to improve indoor air quality. It will advance STEM education through hands-on engineering labs, service-learning design projects, and public demonstrations using a mobile test house. The CAREER project will quantify emission kinetics, multiphase transformations, gas–surface interactions, gas–particle partitioning, and ventilation-driven transport of volatile and semivolatile compounds associated with personal care product use in residential buildings. Controlled emission cell experiments will resolve composition- and temperature-dependent release rates across representative product classes, while full-scale experiments in a residential research test house will quantify airborne persistence, surface sorption and re-emission, nanoparticle nucleation and growth, and ventilation-mediated removal under variable building operating conditions. High-resolution, real-time chemical measurements using online mass spectrometry and advanced aerosol instrumentation will generate volatility- and composition-resolved gas- and particle-phase datasets. Where appropriate, molecular descriptors derived from quantum chemistry methods such as density functional theory will support interpretation of measured chemical reactivity and phase-partitioning behavior and inform AI-assisted fate and transport modeling. Mechanistic modeling frameworks integrating material balance analysis, volatility basis set representations, and indoor-to-outdoor flux quantification will link product characteristics, indoor environmental conditions, and building operation to chemical fate and transport metrics. These activities will produce a comprehensive, volatility-resolved emissions characterization framework for personal care products and establish scalable process models to advance AI-enabled indoor air quality simulation and building system design. Educational activities will help develop a U.S. engineering workforce with expertise in building mechanical systems, indoor environmental monitoring, and AI-driven building design. Undergraduates will engage in service-learning air quality design projects through Purdue’s Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program, will apply research-grade data in hands-on laboratory modules embedded in civil and construction engineering courses, and will participate in full-scale experimentation using the Purdue zero Energy Design Guidance for Engineers (zEDGE) Test House. Intergenerational learning through Purdue Grandparents University and mobile outreach activities at libraries using zEDGE will strengthen students’ communication and systems-thinking skills while translating engineering concepts to the public. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2543724 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Nusrat Jung | Institution: Purdue University, WEST LAFAYETTE, IN | Award Amount: $545,869 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2543724 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2543724.html