Application of desorption tube method to measure the gas-phase SVOC concentration adjacent to material surfaces

Published

September 2, 2017

Author(s)

Mengyan Gong, Havishk Tripathi, Dustin Poppendieck

Abstract

Semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOC) are ubiquitous indoors, commonly used in consumer products as additives to enhance product performance, and may be up to tens-of-percent of product content by mass (Wu, Xie et al. 2016). Human may be exposed to SVOCs after their emission and transport into the indoor environment. Exposures to some SVOCs have been associated with adverse health effects, including endocrine disruption, asthma and allergies (Matsumoto et al., 2008). Therefore, there is interest in quickly and accurately predicting human exposure to SVOCs. The equilibrium SVOC concentration immediately adjacent to the material surface (y0) is a key parameter for estimating SVOC exposure (Little et al. (2012)).Wu et al. (2016) has developed a convenient method to measure y0 using desorption tubes as passive samplers. The method's advantages over previous methods (Xu, Liu et al. 2012, Liang and Xu 2014, Liu, Guo et al. 2014) include shorter experimental time and the elimination of uncertainty introduced by estimating or measuring the convective mass transfer coefficient near the material surface. However, a better understanding of this new method is needed prior to the development of consensus standard methods (i.e., ASTM). This study aims to first compare our measurements and the results by Wu et al. (2016) using the same method and same material, e.g. vinyl flooring, and then examine the influence of sorbent depth in the desorption tube on determining y0 for vinyl flooring.

Proceedings Title

Healthy Buildings 2017 Asia

Conference Dates

September 2-5, 2017

Conference Location

Tainan, TW

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

SVOC, emission, DEHP, vinyl flooring

Citation

Gong, M. , Tripathi, H. and Poppendieck, D. (2017), Application of desorption tube method to measure the gas-phase SVOC concentration adjacent to material surfaces, Healthy Buildings 2017 Asia, Tainan, TW (Accessed May 3, 2024)