Cabin air dynamics: Unraveling the patterns and drivers of volatile organic compound distribution in vehicles

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are ubiquitous in vehicle cabin environments, which can significantly impact the health of drivers and passengers, whereas quick and intelligent prediction methods are lacking. In this study, we firstly analyzed the variations of environmental parameters, VOC levels and potential sources inside a new car during 7 summer workdays, indicating that formaldehyde had the highest concentration and about one third of the measurements exceeded the standard limit for in-cabin air quality. Feature importance analysis reveals that the most important factor affecting in-cabin VOC emission behaviors is the material surface temperature rather than the air temperature. By introducing the attention mechanism and ensemble strategy, we present an LSTM-A-E deep learning model to predict the concentrations of 12 observed typical VOCs, together with other five deep learning models for comparison. By comparing the prediction–observation discrepancies and five evaluation metrics, the LSTM-A-E model demonstrates better performance, which is more consistent with field measurements. Extension of the developed model for predicting the 10-day VOC concentrations in a realistic residence further illustrates its excellent environmental adaptation. This study probes the not-well-explored in-cabin VOC dynamics via observation and deep learning approaches, facilitating rapid prediction and exposure assessment of VOCs in the vehicle micro-environment.