CONTAM Overview

Filters

CONTAM provides some building components with the ability to incorporate filters that act as contaminant removal devices. Filters consist of two parts: the filter itself which is associated with a specific building component (path or duct segment) and filter elements that you can associate with one or more filters. Filter elements provide the physical characteristics of the filter and the mathematical relationship that describes the behavior of the filter during a simulation. This is similar in nature to the relationship between airflow paths and airflow elements and between duct segments and duct flow elements. In another sense, the filter is a specific instance of a filter element.

The following building components can incorporate filters and are described as filter-ready:

Airflow paths
Implicit outdoor air and recirculation air paths of simple air-handling systems
Supplies and returns of simple air-handling systems
Duct segments
Duct terminals

Filter Elements

CONTAM uses mathematical relationships referred to as filter elements or models to implement filters when performing contaminant simulations. CONTAM can implement several different filter models to remove contaminants as they are transported through building components that have filtering capabilities. Every filter must refer to a single filter element; however, multiple filters can refer to the same filter element, and they can also be stored within a CONTAM library file and shared between different CONTAM project files