Medium-density Board Research Articles

A New Method for Determining the Initial Mobile Formaldehyde Concentrations, Partition Coefficients, and Diffusion Coefficients of Dry Building Materials

The initial mobile formaldehyde concentration, C m,o; the partition coefficient, K; and the diffusion coefficient, D, of a dry building material are key parameters to characterize formaldehyde emissions from the building material. The solvent extraction method and direct thermal desorption method can overestimate C m,o because of high temperature. A new method has been developed to determine C m,o under similar conditions to common indoor environment, together with K and D. In the proposed method, the tested materials are placed in an airtight environmental chamber for which the temperature can be controlled by a water bath, then the materials undergo a multisorption/emission process and the instantaneous formalde-hyde concentration in the chamber is recorded. The K and C m,o are determined from the equilibrium concentrations after every sorption by means of the linear least-square regression, and D is obtained by fitting the concentration at the emission stage into a mass-transfer-based model in the literature. Four kinds of wooden medium-density boards are tested. The C m,o measured using this method is the mobile formaldehyde concentration in the material, which differs significantly from the total formaldehyde concentration in the material measured by using the traditional method recommended by the Chinese standard (GB/T 17657-1999) extraction method. This means that the mobile formaldehyde takes only a small portion of the total quantity in the tested material. The K, D, and C m,o values measured using this new method are used to predict formaldehyde concentrations for sorption processes. The results agree well with experimental data. In addition, some factors influencing the accuracy are analyzed.

An improved extraction method to determine the initial emittable concentration and the partition coefficient of VOCs in dry building materials

Based on the extraction method presented by Smith et al. (2008), this paper proposes an improved method, the multi-emission/flush regression method, to simultaneously determine the initial emittable concentration and the partition coefficient. Compared to the extraction method, the proposed method has the following advantages: (1) it is unnecessary for the target volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to emit completely from the material, thus greatly reducing experimental time; (2) it provides a simpler way to obtain the partition coefficients of VOCs for tested materials and can avoid the measurement uncertainties at low VOC concentrations which often occur during the last few cycles of the extraction method; (3) it does not require grinding the building material into powders thus making this method more convenient to use. Comparisons were made between the initial emittable VOC concentrations determined by the original extraction method and the proposed method. Results show good agreements between these two methods. To further validate the proposed method, the type of static chamber developed by Wang et al. (2006) was used to conduct the experiment for a type of medium density board, and formaldehyde was selected as the target compound. Based on the initial emittable concentration and partition coefficient obtained using the proposed method, and the diffusion coefficient obtained by the mercury intruding porosimetry, the chamber formaldehyde concentration was predicted and compared with the experimental measurements. Results show that the predicted chamber VOC concentration using the measured parameters agree well with the experimental data.

Macro–meso two-scale model for predicting the VOC diffusion coefficients and emission characteristics of porous building materials

Through the observation of the pore structure and mercury intruding porosimetry (MIP) experiments of some typical porous building materials, we found that the diffusion coefficient of the material can be expressed by that of a representative elementary volume (REV) in which the pore structure can be simplified as a connection in series of macro and meso pores. Based upon that, a macro–meso two-scale model for predicting the diffusion coefficient of porous building materials is proposed. In contrast to the traditional porous mass transfer model for determining the diffusion coefficient described in the literature [Blondeau, P., Tiffonnet, A.L., Damian, A., Amiri, O., Molina, J.L., 2003. Assessment of contaminant diffusivities in building materials from porosimetry tests. Indoor Air 13, 302–310; Seo, J., Kato, S., Ataka, Y., Zhu, Q., 2005. Evaluation of effective diffusion coefficient in various building materials and absorbents by mercury intrusion porosimetry. In Proceedings of the Indoor Air, Beijing, China, pp. 1854–1859], the proposed model relates the volatile organic compound (VOC) diffusion coefficient of building material not only to the porosity of the building material, but also to the pore size distribution and pore connection modes. To verify the model, a series of experiments of VOC emissions of three types of medium-density board were conducted. The comparison of the model and experimental results shows that the proposed model agrees much better with the experimental results than the traditional models in the literature. More validation for other building materials is needed. The proposed model is useful for predicting the VOC diffusion coefficient of porous building materials and for developing low VOC emission building materials.