State-of-the-Art in the Measurement of Volatile Organic Compounds Emitted from Building Products: Results of Eurpoean Interlaboratory Comparison.

Eighteen laboratories from 10 European countries participated in a comparison organized in the frame of the VOCEM project, a 2.5 year research collaboration between 4 research institutes and 4 industrial companies. The scope of the project was to improve the procedure used to measure VOC emitted from building materials and products in small test chambers. The interlaboratory comparison included the GC-MS determination of 5 target compounds from casrpet, 8 from PVC cushion vinyl and 2 from paint. For the first time, chamber recovery (sinks), homogeneity of solid materials and possible contamination during transport were tested. The results show that the intralaboratory variance (random errors) is much smaller than the interlaboratory variance (systematic errors). Main causes of interlab. discrepancies were (a) analytical errors; (b) losses of the heaviest compounds due to sorption on the chamber walls; C non homogeneity of the materials. The output of this work concerns both the objective of labelling materials with regard to their VOC emissions and the pre-standard drafted by CEN for this type of determination.

DE BORTOLI Maurizio;  KEPHALOPOULOS Stylianos;  KIRCHNER Severine;  SCHAUENBURG Herbert;  VISSERS Henk Christianus; 

1998-10-13

JRC17131

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC17131,