Abstract

The 20 L small chamber test method is to evaluate pollutants such as TVOC, formaldehyde emitted from building materials. This method was only designed to evaluate the surface emission of sample exposed in the chamber. In this method, building materials cut with a fixed standard size are fixed in a sample sealing box. The sample sealing box is put into the 20 L test chamber. This chamber is ventilated at a standard air change rate with purified air for 7 days then the sample from the chamber is collected and analyzed to measure the emission rate of TVOC and formaldehyde. In this method, however, if the sealing box does not guarantee airtightness, accurate evaluation for the building materials can not be achieved due to the pollutants emitted from edge of the sample so called, edge effect. This edge effect can be much greater when evaluating panels such as plywood, flooring due to their surface treatment. In this study, flooring was tested to check airtightness of the sample sealing box with analytic results between 1L and 20 L test chamber. Furniture materials like LPM coated one side surface treatment and MDF coated both sides surface treatment with LPM were tested to identify whether the improvement of the sample sealing box airtightness is possible with the comparison between existing and improved test method that low VOC emission tape was used to seal the sample edge. After 7 days, MDF TVOC emission rate was different according to the existence and nonexistence of tape. The emission rate of the existing test method was <TEX>$0.009mg/m^2h$</TEX> and that of improved test method was <TEX>$0.003mg/m^2h$</TEX>. Relative standard deviation for the existing test method was <TEX>$0.004mg/m^2h$</TEX> and relative standard deviation for the improved test method was <TEX>$0.002mg/m^2h$</TEX> when the same sample was analyzed three times. The improved test method in this study using low VOC emission tape was effective and able to reduce the heterogeneous effect of the edge from the sample sealing box.