| Keywords |
VOCs ; Formaldehyde ; Wooden furniture ; Air exchange rate |
| Abstract |
Apartment houses use various wooden furniture for kitchen, bedrooms, living rooms. The levels of chemical emissions from wooden furniture can be different based on the law materials and surface finishing. The grades of wooden materials are defined by Korean Standard based on the Formaldehyde emission rate. However, the relationship between emission rates from each material and resulting indoor air concentrations has not been studied quantitatively. Thus, this paper aims to find appropriate grades of wooden materials to maintain healthy indoor air quality in apartment houses using an experimental study and computational simulations. Six types of wooden furniture are experimented in large mock-up chambers. Based on the experimental results, computer simulation is conducted to evaluate long-term effects with each wooden furniture. As a result, furniture with the raw material class of E1 turned out to have higher formaldehyde concentration than that with the raw material class of E0, indicating that there are differences in the pollutant emissions with regard to different raw material classes. However, different raw material classes did not have effects on TVOC emissions. Instead, TVOC emission was affected by the surface coating and it showed high initial concentrations especially in the case of fancy vinyl particle board. Concentrations of benzene and styrene were maintained below the recommended values during the whole measurement periods, while toluene exceeded the recommended value in all the six samples. Also the results show that E1 Grade wood can be used in an apartment house with an air exchange rate of 0.5 or higher. |