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Development and verification of a method to measure the decrease in indoor pollutant concentration caused by an adsorptive building material are reported. Mass transfer has a great influence on the material's performance. The equivalent ventilation rate (Q(ads)) of the adsorption performance is defined as a new index that corresponds to the mass transfer coefficient. The equivalent ventilation rate (Q(ads)) can be used directly to compare the effect of pollutant concentration decrease via adsorption with the effect of ventilation.

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Recently, sorptive building materials have been used to improve indoor air quality in Japan. By making use of sorptive building materials, the concentration of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) within rooms can be reduced without the need to install any special equipment. In this paper, the effect of sorptive building materials with respect to reducing toluene concentrations in the air of small test chambers has been assessed using sorption flux. We have also examined how environmental parameters influence concentration reduction performance. The effectiveness of activated carbon at reducing toluene concentrations when used as a sorptive building material depend considerably on the air exchange rate of the chamber, the load factor of the sorptive materials and the mass transfer coefficient. In order to evaluate and compare the sorptive performance of various building materials, it is necessary to conduct tests under identical parameter conditions. The experimental results and computational fluid dynamics analysis show that sorptive building materials are a fairly effective agent for reducing indoor VOC concentrations, and that this effect can be expected to be replicated during practical use.