Abstract

This study aimed to investigate and to quantify the impact of sorption processes on perceived air quality using sensory panels as the measuring device. The experiments were performed in four similar, adjacent, unfurnished offices. Samples of carpet, painted gypsum board, virgin gypsum board, linoleum and Semia were tested individually and as a combination of two materials. To investigate the interaction between the pollutants emitted from the test building materials and the actual room surfaces, the air polluted by two different building materials was mixed in a separate room without the presence of the building materials. Each experiment lasted between one week (adsorption stage only) to 10 days (adsorption and desorption stages). Untrained panels assessed the air quality at specific time intervals after moving the materials into or out of the rooms, depending on the design of each experiment. The results indicated that sorption affects the perceived air quality significantly. For all performed experiments, the presence of an additional room surface (samples of painted gypsum board) together with samples of carpet or linoleum improved the perceived air quality in that room and in comparison to the air in the room with carpet alone or painted gypsum board alone. The improvement was consistent despite the different kind of building materials used in the experiments, the different panels that performed the sensory assessments and the different environmental conditions for the different experiments. Moreover, adsorption/desorption coefficients for the room surfaces and the painted gypsum board were calculated assuming a Langmuir type of adsorption and when the pollution source was either carpet or linoleum. As anticipated the linear Langmuir model appeared to be suitable for the painted gypsum board and the room surfaces (flat smooth surfaces). In this work, based on sensory data, it was possible to get reasonable values for sorption parameters for painted gypsum board and the room surfaces presumably because the chemicals emitted from the carpet or linoleum used in the experiments were relatively similar in terms of their sorption parameters. The results demonstrated that sensory assessments could be used to derive sorption parameters for common indoor materials interacting with common indoors pollution sources. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)