Kitchen hood performance in food service operations.

Cooking processes at food service operations release fumes that present risks of food contamination, fire, and employee exposure to hazardous chemicals. Local exhaust ventilation in the form of kitchen hoods is commonly used to control these risks. State codes often refer to the need for adequate ventilation, but hoods are not an explicit point on most inspection sheets and are rarely quantitatively assessed to determine if flow rates meet recommended levels.

Predicting room vapor concentrations due to spills of organic solvents.

Relatively small spills of volatile liquids can result in short-term, high-concentration exposures. Because of the transient nature of these exposures, air sampling may be precluded. As an alternative, exposure assessment can be done by mathematical modeling.