How to predict emissions of volatile organic compounds from solid building materials? A critical review on mass transfer models

Abstract Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitting from solid building materials can cause adverse human health and environmental climate effects. It's more cost effective and powerful for mass-transfer emission models to describe the emission characteristic of VOCs than emission chamber studies. In this review, the existing main physical mechanism-based models for predicting VOCs emissions from dry solid building materials have been discussed, as well as their differences and similarities. Ignoring internal diffusion and porosity of solid materials, single-phase model is generally quite safe for use in actual condition. Conversely, porous media model is good for understanding VOC-transfer principles in porous materials. Additionally, the porous media model and the single-phase model can be transformed mutually because their model parameters are correlative. The availability of emission models is largely determined by the reliable and useful model parameters. Therefore, substantial technologies and novel methods have been developed for parameter estimation, which have also been reviewed in this paper. How to readily and rapidly obtain model parameters is a future development direction. In addition, applying emission models to predict and control VOCs emission from other solid waste materials is another future research prospect.