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

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 30m³ full-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.