A spatial fractional diffusion model for predicting the characteristics of VOCs emission in porous dry building material.

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) concentrations of dry building materials can significantly affect the quality of indoor air. In this paper, a spatial fractional diffusion model is established by introducing fractional Fick's law, based on the fact that the pore structure of porous building materials has a strongly impact on VOCs diffusion. Furthermore, the areal porosity of the material is drawn into the convection mass transfer equation. The relevant parameters are estimated by a kind of optimization algorithm. The fractional nonlinear equations are tackled by the finite difference method combined with L2-algorithm. Results indicate that spatial fractional diffusion model agrees better with the experimental data than Deng and Kim's model. The spatial fractional diffusion model is used to describe the formaldehyde concentration in the particleboard according to the experimental data. Taking formaldehyde as a common substance, the influences of physical parameters on VOCs diffusion are predicted by this model. The results of numerical simulation demonstrate that the diffusion is consistent with the actual situation.