Using ozone air cleaners to remove indoor volatile organic compounds

Indoor volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are known to cause many human health problems. Ozone air cleaners were claimed to remove the indoor VOCs, but their effectiveness was still unclear. In this study, we selected six ozone air cleaners to evaluate their effectiveness on the control of target VOCs (toluene and formaldehyde). The experiments were conducted in a 11.3-m(3) stainless steel environmental test chamber under 25 degrees C and 60% relative humidity. The clean air delivery rate for toluene and formaldehyde ranged from 0.0565 to 0.424 m(3)/hr, and from 0.0068 to 0.747 m(3)/hr, respectively. The removal rates observed were much high than the removal rates based on the ozone-toluene and ozone-formaldehyde reaction constants measured in previous studies. Thus, the removal of toluene and formaldehyde may result from the other mechanism such as adsorption, and high-voltage electric discharge or ultraviolet lamp, used to generate ozone.