Approaches in Modeling the Impact of Air Pollution-Induced Material Degradation

Damage to materials from air pollution is considered to be an important economic factor in society. For this reason, it was decided as part of the 1988 Young Scientists Summer Program at IIASA to explore the possibility of including a submodel for materials damage in IIASA's Regional Acidification INformation and Simulation (RAINS) model. This Working Paper is the result of this investigation. Although the conclusion of the author is that it is at the present time premature to include materials damage in RAINS, due to a lack of input data, this report contains a wealth of information on existing background data (such as damage functions) and possible analytic approaches once the input data are available. As such, therefore, this paper represents a very important first step in a possible future inclusion of materials damage in a model of transboundary air pollution.