Development of a multi-VOC reference material for quality assurance in materials emission testing

Emission test chamber measurement is necessary to proof building materials as sources of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The results of such measurements are used to evaluate materials and label them according to their potential to emit harmful substances, polluting indoor air. If only labelled materials were installed indoors, this would improve indoor air quality and prevent negative impacts on human health. Because of the complex testing procedure, reference materials for the quality assurance are mandatory. Currently, there is a lack of such materials because most building products show a broad variation of emissions even within one batch. A previous study indicates lacquers, mixed with volatile organic pollutants, as reproducible emission source for a wide range of substances. In the present study, the curing of the lacquer-VOC mixture inside micro-chambers was optimised. Therefore, the humidity and the chamber flow were varied. Typical indoor air pollutants with a wide range of volatilities, for example, styrene, n-hexadecane, dimethyl and dibutyl phthalate were selected. It turned out that, under optimised curing parameters inside the micro-chamber, their emission can be reproduced with variations of less than 10 %. With this, a next important step towards a reference material for emission testing was achieved.