Reliability of VOC emission chamber testing - progress and remaining challenges

摘要

Chamber emission testing of volatile organic compounds (VOC) and formaldehyde is becoming more and more important for construction products, furniture and consumer products. Therefore, the question of reliability of such tests is crucial. A number of round robin tests and other comparative investigations were undertaken in order to document the variability of chamber emission testing. When using material with homogeneous emission properties it is possible today to achieve a repeatability of the analyses (after sampling from test chamber) of ± 10 %, a repeatability of the whole procedure within one laboratory of ± 20 %, and a variability of test results from different laboratories of ± 50 % (as RSD around average). Mainly, the differences are due to the analytical procedures. There are successful approaches to improve comparability of different laboratories, and it does not seem impossible any longer to obtain a variability of ± 30 %, but this has not yet been achieved.