The FLEC® has been validated and used in research for many years.
Below is a publication list of journal articles, abstracts, poster or oral presentations where the FLEC or CHEMATEC’s other products have been in focus.
If you have anything that can be added to the list, we encourage you to contact CHEMATEC.
2022 |
Wang, Haimei; Xiong, Jianyin; Wei, Wenjuan In: Environment International, vol. 168, pp. 107451, 2022, ISSN: 0160-4120. Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Indoor and vehicular air quality (IVAQ), Measurement, Pre-assessment, Semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs), temperature, Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) @article{Wang2022,The emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs) from indoor building and vehicle cabin materials can adversely affect human health. Many mechanistic models to predict the VOC/SVOC emission characteristics have been proposed. Nowadays, the main obstacle to accurate model prediction is the availability and reliability of the physical parameters used in the model, such as the initial emittable concentration, the diffusion coefficient, the partition coefficient, and the gas-phase SVOC concentration adjacent to the material surface. The purpose of this work is to review the existing methods for measuring the key parameters of VOCs/SVOCs from materials in both indoor and vehicular environments. The pros and cons of these methods are analyzed, and the available datasets found in the literature are summarized. Some methods can determine one single key parameter, while other methods can determine two or three key parameters simultaneously. The impacts of multiple factors (temperature, relative humidity, loading ratio, and air change rate) on VOC/SVOC emission behaviors are discussed. The existing measurement methods span very large spatial and time scales: the spatial scale varies from micro to macro dimensions; and the time scale in chamber tests varies from several hours to one month for VOCs, and may even span years for SVOCs. Based on the key parameters, a pre-assessment approach for indoor and vehicular air quality is introduced in this review. The approach uses the key parameters for different material combinations to pre-assess the VOC/SVOC concentrations or human exposure levels during the design stage of buildings or vehicles, which can assist designers to select appropriate materials and achieve effective source control. |
2013 |
Xiong, Jianyin; Wang, Lixin; Bai, Yuhua; Zhang, Yinping Measuring the characteristic parameters of VOC emission from paints Journal Article In: Building and Environment, vol. 66, pp. 65 - 71, 2013, ISSN: 0360-1323. Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Characteristic parameters, Emission, Indoor air quality (IAQ), Paints, Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) @article{XIONG201365,The emission characteristic parameters of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from paints are the initial concentration, the diffusion coefficient and the paint/air partition coefficient. It is necessary to determine these parameters for fully understanding the emission behaviors as well as for source control. Based on detailed mass transfer analysis of VOC emissions from paints, a novel method is developed to measure these parameters, which owns the following merits: (1) the diffusion coefficient and partition coefficient can be simultaneously determined; (2) it takes less than 12 h for the cases studied and indicates high measurement accuracy (R2 in the range of 0.921–0.939). Ventilated chamber experiments are performed to obtain the two parameters of methylcyclohexane and toluene emissions from one kind of solvent-based paint. The effectiveness of the method is verified by the good agreement between model predictions based on the determined characteristic parameters and experiments. The present approach is then applied to analyze the experimental data in the literature, and good results are also obtained, which further demonstrates that the approach is convincing and reliable. Our new approach should prove useful for rapid prediction and characterization of VOC emissions from paints as well as from other wet materials. |
2010 |
Missia, Dafni A; Demetriou, E; Michael, N; Tolis, E I; Bartzis, J G Indoor exposure from building materials: A field study Journal Article In: Atmospheric Environment, vol. 44, no. 35, pp. 4388 - 4395, 2010, ISSN: 1352-2310. Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Building materials emissions, Field and laboratory emission cell (FLEC), Indoor air quality (IAQ), Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) @article{MISSIA20104388,The present study has been conducted in the frame of BUMA (Prioritization of Building Materials Emissions as indoor pollution sources), a European funded project, aiming at assessing the exposure to emitted compounds in indoor air. Field campaigns in five (5) European cities (Milan, Copenhagen, Dublin, Athens and Nicosia) were carried out. These campaigns covered weekly winter and summer concentration measurements in two (2) public buildings and two (2) private houses in each city. BTEX, terpenes, and carbonyls were measured using passive sampling in two sites inside the building and one outside. VOC emission measurements on selected building material have also been performed using Field and Laboratory Emission Cell (FLEC). The results on indoor concentrations for compounds such as formaldehyde (1.2–62.6μgm−3), acetaldehyde (0.7–41.6μgm−3), toluene (0.9–163.5μgm−3), xylenes (0.2–177.5μgm−3) and acetone (2.8–308.8μgm−3) have shown diversity and relatively significant indoor sources depending on the building type, age etc. Indoor concentrations of these substances are varied depending on the building age and type. The percentage of approximately 40% of the indoor air quality levels originated from building materials. |
2007 |
Qian, Ke; Zhang, Yinping; Little, John C; Wang, Xinke Dimensionless correlations to predict VOC emissions from dry building materials Journal Article In: Atmospheric Environment, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 352 - 359, 2007, ISSN: 1352-2310. Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Dimensionless correlations, Dry building material, Emission, Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) @article{QIAN2007352,Based on the most recently published mass transfer model of volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from dry building materials, it is found that the dimensionless emission rate and total emission quantity are functions of just four dimensionless parameters, the ratio of mass transfer Biot number to partition coefficient (Bim/K), the mass transfer Fourier number (Fom), the dimensionless air exchange rate (Nδ2/Dm) and the ratio of building material volume to chamber or room volume (Aδ/V). Through numerical analysis and data fitting, a group of dimensionless correlations for estimating the emission rate from dry building materials is obtained. The predictions of the correlations are validated against the predictions made by the mass transfer model. Using the correlations, the VOC emission rate from dry building materials can be conveniently calculated without having to solve the complicated mass transfer equations. Thus it is very simple to estimate VOC emissions for a given condition. The predictions of the correlations agree well with experimental data in the literature except in the initial few hours. Furthermore, based on the correlations, a relationship between the emission rates of a material in two different situations is deduced. With this relationship, the results for a given building material in a test chamber can be scaled to those under real conditions, if the dimensionless parameters are within the appropriate region for the correlations. The relationship also explicitly explains the impacts of air velocity, load ratio, and air exchange rate on the VOC emission rate, which determines the feasibility of assuming that the VOC emission rates in real conditions are the same as those in the test chambers. |