Determination of the equivalent emission parameters of wood-based furniture by applying C-history method

Published Date

October 2011, Vol.45(31):5602–5611, doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2011.04.033

Title 

Determination of the equivalent emission parameters of wood-based furniture by applying C-history method

• Author 

• Yuan Yao ^a
• Jianyin Xiong ^b
• Weiwei Liu ^a
• Jinhan Mo ^a
• Yinping Zhang ^a,,

• aDepartment of Building Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
• bSchool of Mechanical and Vehicular Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Received 21 January 2011. Revised 13 April 2011. Accepted 15 April 2011. Available online 1 May 2011.

Abstract

VOC pollution in indoor air has become a serious problem in urban areas of China. Building materials and furniture used indoors are the main sources of such pollution. How to determine the VOC emission characteristics of furniture rapidly and conveniently is an important but difficult problem. In this paper, we extend the C-history method for determining the VOC emission characteristic parameters (i.e., the initial emittable VOC concentration, C₀, the partition coefficient, K, and the diffusion coefficient, D) of homogeneous building materials developed by Xiong et al. (2011a)to measure the parameters of VOC emissions from wood-based furniture in a 30 m³full-scale chamber. The conditions under which there are three equivalent parameters, C_0,equ, K_equ and D_equ for multi-layer board and wood-based furniture is analyzed and presented. A series of tests were performed to determine the three parameters of some commonly used wood-based furniture in China. A run of independent ventilated chamber experiments were carried out to validate the method. The results show that: (1) The agreement of the formaldehyde and six VOCs concentrations between the ventilated experiment and the simulated results based on the determined parameters is very good; (2) The method could be used in testing multi-layer board and wood-based furniture. The testing time is usually less than 3 days as compared with the furniture testing method typically performed under ventilated chamber conditions and take 5,7,14 or 28 days. The possibilities and limitations of applying the method to the existing furniture labeling schemes are discussed.

Highlights

► Conditions under which there are equivalent parameters for wood-based furniture. ► Applying C-history method in wood-based furniture testing. ► Independent validation method was used during the test. ► Formaldehyde and other six VOCs were selected as targets. ► Reducing the typical testing time to within 3 days.

Keywords

• Volatile organic compounds (VOC)
• Indoor air quality (IAQ)
• Wood-based furniture
• Emission
• C-history method

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• ∗ 
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