Two-parameter C-history method: A fast and accurate method for determining the characteristic parameters of formaldehyde/VOC early-stage emissions from building materials.

With the worsening indoor air quality in developing countries, more and more attention is being paid to indoor air pollution, especially formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from indoor building materials. A series of methods, such as the C-history method, have been proposed to determine the mechanistic parameters of formaldehyde and other VOC emissions. However, these methods require a relatively long test duration (at least 3 days) and may yield a multi-solution problem for these parameters. Therefore, we have developed a novel method, the two-parameter C-history method, to overcome these limitations by measuring the two early-stage emission characteristic parameters for formaldehyde/VOCs. The experimental results validate the accuracy of this method for different building materials and showed that the test duration can be substantially shortened to within 12 h. Based on this, we propose a new method to quickly predict the two emission characteristic parameters at different temperatures. We optimize the experimental parameters and discuss their influence to further improve accuracy. This method will be useful in engineering applications.