Emission of volatile organic compounds from multi-layer structural insulated panels

Indoor air quality is recognized as one of the most important environmental concerns, since people spend almost 90% of their lifetime indoors. Indoor sources of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are a determinant of air quality in houses. Many materials used to construct and finish the interiors of new houses emit VOCs. These emissions are a probable cause of acute health effects and discomfort among occupants. Ventilation is another determinant of indoor air quality in houses, because it serves as the primary mechanism for removal of gaseous contaminants generated indoors. Thus, higher contaminant concentrations are expected at lower ventilation rates given constant emission rates. The trend in new construction is to make house envelopes tighter for higher energy efficiency. The use of Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) in new construction and major renovation to create very tight building envelopes is one popular approach to realizing this goal. The basic SIPs configuration uses oriented strand board (OSB) and polystyrene foam (PSF) in a multi-layered sandwich-like structure. Specific benefits of SIPs include lower energy consumption, stronger more durable structures and better resource efficiency. These advantages make panelized systems very attractive from both environmental impact and energy use perspectives. However, there is a potential for houses constructed with SIPs to have degraded air quality relative to conventionally constructed houses that utilize fewer engineered wood products. OSB emits pentanal and hexanal, two odorous aldehydes. These contaminants originate in the wood drying process through the breakdown of wood tissue and are, thus, inherent to most engineered wood products. The PSF in SIPs is a major source of styrene. The large surface area of installed SIPs systems (typically the entire exterior shell), combined with the resulting decrease in ventilation rate due to very low infiltration, exacerbates the indoor air problem. Thus, the potential release of volatile contaminants must be taken into careful consideration when designing homes constructed with SIPs. The ability to predict and ultimately minimize the negative impact of panel systems on indoor concentrations of contaminants of concern would be extremely useful for advancing housing technologies. No prior investigations of VOC emissions from SIPs have been reported in the literature.; Two main methods are used to characterize emissions from building materials: chamber studies and mathematical modeling. While chamber studies are costly and time-consuming, mathematical modeling is becoming an economical and effective alternative. Physically-based models are especially useful because they provide insight into the governing mechanisms and the factors that control the emissions process. Although emissions from building materials have traditionally been empirically characterized in chambers, we have recently validated a mechanistic model that predicts VOC emissions from vinyl flooring. The approach involved independently measuring C0 (the initial material-phase concentration), D (the material-phase diffusion coefficient), K (the material/air partition coefficient) and then predicting the emission rate a priori using a fundamental mass-transfer model We now wish to generalize this approach and use it to predict emissions from multi-layered SIPs. To begin with, we will apply a single-layer model to predict emissions from each of the two SIP components: OSB and PSF. Once this has been accomplished, it should be possible to develop a multi-layer model to predict emissions from the composite SIPs.; Our first research objective was to characterize transport of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in polystyrene foam (PSF), a diffusion-controlled building material. The sorption/desorption behavior of the polystyrene foam was investigated using a single-component system. A microbalance was used to measure the sorption/desorption kinetics and to obtain equilibrium...