Computational fluid dynamics simulation of formaldehyde emission characteristics and its experimental validation in environment chamber

We investigated the effect of supply air rate and temperature on formaldehyde emission characteristics in an environment chamber. A three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) chamber model for simulating formaldehyde emission in twelve different cases was developed for obtaining formaldehyde concentration by the area-weighted average method. Laboratory experiments were conducted in an environment chamber to validate the simulation results of twelve different cases and the formaldehyde concentration was measured by continuous sampling. The results show that there was good agreement between the model prediction and the experimental values within 4.3 difference for each case. The CFD simulation results varied in the range from 0.21 mg/m^3 to 0.94 mg/m^3, and the measuring results in the range from 0.17 mg/m^3 to 0.87 mg/m^3. The variation trend of formaldehyde concentration with supply air rate and temperature variation for CFD simulation and experiment measuring was consistent. With the existence of steady formaldehyde emission sources, formaldehyde concentration generally increased with the increase of temperature, and it decreased with the increase of air supply rate. We also provided some reasonable suggestions to reduce formaldehyde concentration and to improve indoor air quality for newly decorated rooms.