Effect of VOCs-adsorbing particles on the VOCs emission from wood

Abstract

This study presents the effect of the VOCs-adsorbing particles and air velocity on the transport of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in a wood in a small-scale geometry. This study aims to show that the use of VOCs-adsorbing particle can enhance significantly the VOCs emission from building indoor materials before they are actually installed in a residential place. A numerical simulation based on two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model has been performed to investigate the influences of air velocity and particle concentration. Together with air, particles come into the channel on which a wood is laid. Numerical results show that particles in the air blown to the channel drastically decrease VOCs concentration in the air. With an increase in the inlet particle concentration, the volume-averaged VOCs concentration in the airside decreases a lot. The air flow rate has significant impacts on the airside VOCs concentration. An increase in the air flow rate decreases the airside VOCs concentration. Under the same air flow rate at the inlet, larger inlet velocity with smaller channel width yields lower airside VOCs concentration when particles are released into the model. Meanwhile, the VOCs concentration in wood of 5cm thickness decreases a little bit under a situation with high inlet velocity and high inlet particle concentration. When wood thickness is thinner, the VOCs concentration in wood significantly decreased, which means larger increase in the rate of VOCs emission from a thin wood.