Carpets for office use are nowadays in most cases applied with water-based adhesives. During the last decade the complaints about odors and emission of volatile organic compounds from these fitted carpets have increased dramatically, causing a major problem for indoor air quality. In a series of investigations it has been established that in many cases the adhesives used were the primary cause of complaints. This is initially surprising, since usually sol ventfree water-based dispersion adhesives were used.

This paper describes the analytical approach of analyzing a broad variety of volatile compounds within a wide boiling point range with thermal desorption GC/MS.

Thermal Desorption System (TDS)

The GERSTEL Thermal Desorption System (TDS) is a flexible multi-functional system for highly sensitive determination of volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds (VOCs and SVOCs) that have been trapped on adsorbent tubes or on GERSTEL Twisters.

The TDS is also frequently used for direct thermal extraction and determination of VOCs and SVOCs from solids without sample preparation. Application examples are natural products, flavor and fragance, emssions from materials that are used indoors in buildings or in automobiles, semiconductors, polymers and packaging.