A standard reference for chamber testing of material VOC emissions: Design principle and performance

Environmental chambers are widely used to test formaldehyde and other volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from indoor materials and furniture. However, there is a lack of a proven method to assess the precision of the test results of the chamber system. In this paper, we describe a new standard reference, LIFE (liquid-inner tube diffusion-film-emission), to address this problem. This reference has the following salient features: (1) Constant emission rate, with less than 3.0% change with an ambient airflow speed (>0.014 m/s) at furniture emission range (0.1–1.0 mg/m3 in a 30 m3 chamber with air change rate of 1/h) under standard chamber test conditions as specified by ISO 16000-9 (23 °C, 50% RH); (2) Long duration of emissions, on the order of 1000 h; (3) Easy to store, apply and maintain. The design principle and criteria of the LIFE reference are presented. An analytical model and dimensionless analysis were applied to optimize the factors influencing the emission rate, and experiments were conducted to validate the analytical results. In addition, the equivalent emission parameters of the reference, i.e., the initial emittable concentration, the diffusion coefficient and the partition coefficient, were determined through a three-parameter optimizing regression. This can then be used to check the reliability of a chamber method for testing these three parameters. The developed standard reference should prove useful for calibrating chamber systems for indoor material/furniture VOC emissions tests.