A Design Assessment System to Protect Buildings from Internal Chemical and Biological Threats

Recent world events involving chemical and biological (CB) attacks within critical infrastructure have highlighted a potential threat to buildings and their occupants. As a result, protecting buildings from CB attacks has become an important design consideration. A collaborative research effort is underway to develop a design assessment system that will provide decision makers the ability to compare multiple building designs for protection against an internal CB release. The assessment system includes modeling and simulation of CB contaminant dispersion, a quantitative financial method to compare design costs, and a multicriteria decision making phase. This paper outlines the design assessment system phases, and focuses on the computational details for assessing building CB exposure using multizone and spreadsheet programs. A hospital emergency room is used as an illustrative example. The concept of fraction of building protected (FBP) is explained, and the cost percent increases associated with 15 redesign options are presented.