Adsorption of trichloroethylene on common indoor materials studied using a combined inverse gas chromatography and frequency response technique

Abstract

Building materials can act as sinks and sources of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which are indoor air contaminants. A knowledge of the dynamics of VOC sorption processes on building materials is needed in order to fully understand how these compounds can influence indoor air quality, and thus, their potential for influencing human health. In the current work, a combination of classical inverse gas chromatography (IGC) and frequency response (FR) technique was used to investigate the sorptive partition and diffusion coefficients of trichloroethylene (TCE) on building materials. This is a compound of considerable interest in many indoor air environments, particularly those impacted by vapor intrusion processes, and the TCE also serves as a model VOC for demonstrating the method. Six typical indoor materials (carpet, cotton, cinderblock, printer paper, polyethylene, drywall) were selected to demonstrate the technique. A selected building material was packed into a stainless-steel column and exposed to a low-concentration TCE flow applied in a sinusoidal temporal pattern at room temperature (22 ℃). In this case, cinderblock showed the highest sorption uptakes (6209 ng TCE/g material-ppbv TCE) and the slowest sorption rates (7.3 × 10−10 m2/s) among tested materials. The results from the FR-IGC method are compared to other conventionally obtained results and agree well.