The Olf

I wonder if anyone got this one right?

I also wonder where the setter got this question from.

There is (you may, or may not, be surprised to hear) a page entitled Olf (unit) on Wikipedia. But it cites only one source, and that is a paper published in 1987 by the Laboratory of Heating and Air Conditioning, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby (held by the University of California, San Francisco, in a library of "tobacco industry internal corporate documents produced during litigation between US States and the seven major tobacco industry organizations and other sources".)

This paper is credited to a Danish academic called P. O. Fanger. Povl Ole Fanger was (according to Wikipedia) "an expert in the field of thermal comfort and perception of indoor environments. He was a senior professor at the International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy at the Technical University of Denmark. He was a visiting University Professor at Syracuse University when he died [in 2006] at the age of 72 from an abdominal aortic aneurysm." You can read more about Professor Fanger here (where his first name is given as Pavel).

Wikipedia informs us that "One olf is the sensory pollution strength from a standard person defined as an average adult working in an office or similar non–industrial workplace, sedentary and in thermal comfort, with a hygienic standard equivalent of 0.7 baths per day and whose skin has a total area of 1.8 square metres. It was defined to quantify the strength of pollution sources which can be perceived by humans."

A website called Sizes.com goes into more detail: "A unit describing the rate at which odor is added to air, based on human perception of odor. One olf is the rate at which 1 human adult, who is wearing deodorant but not perfume, takes 0.7 baths per day, changes his or her underwear every day, and is resting at a comfortable air temperature, emits air pollutants (which the researchers call 'bioeffluents', and most of us, 'body odor'). The olf is used in designing ventilation systems to reach specified levels of perceived air quality."

Prof. Fanger also introduced a unit called the decipol, which is "the perceived air quality (PAQ) in a space with a sensory load of one olf (one standard person) ventilated by 10 L/s. It was developed to quantify how the strength of indoor pollution sources indoors influence air quality as it is perceived by humans." I mention this so that you are fore-warned when this comes up in your next quiz.

In all this documentation I was fully expecting to find the date 1 April. But to my surprise, I never did.

In a similar vein, I can't help wondering where the name Povl (or Pavel) Ole Fanger came from.