44. Temperature Impact on the Emissions from VOC and Formaldehyde Reference Sources

In order to improve the measurement accuracy for indoor volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and formaldehyde emissions, the polymethyl pentene (PMP) reference material and the liquid-inner tube diffusion-film-emission (LIFE) reference source were developed as two qualified tools to evaluate the performance of a chamber system for furniture/building material VOCs/formaldehyde emission tests. The temperature effect on the emission of PMP reference loaded with toluene and LIFE reference loaded with formaldehyde was measured in some pioneer researches. In this paper, the correlations of temperature and the emission parameters (diffusion coefficient of VOCs/formaldehyde in the material, material/gas partition coefficient) of both references were investigated. The correlations were fixed for each reference at the temperature of 10, 23, and 30 °C with the target VOCs of toluene for PMP and formaldehyde for LIFE. The results show that there are exponential relationships between the emission parameters and the temperature which are similar to the correlations developed for emissions from building materials. This phenomenon expends the usage of the original correlations addressing the temperature effect on building material’s emission parameters to general correlations of temperature effect on the parameters of indoor VOCs/formaldehyde emissions from building materials and reference sources.