Odours might cause offensive nuisance and are under suspicion to be directly harmful to health. Surprisingly their assessment is by definition no part of the determination of indoor air quality (yet). As odours emit from building materials as well as from common consumer goods the users awareness increases continuously and demand for improved consumer protection raises. In comparison to well established methods for the determination of volatile organic compounds (VOC) in the air, there is little experience regarding the applicability, comparability and reproducibility of odour measurements. Considering this, the international and the German standardisation take into account odour assessment, e.g. ISO 16000-28 and VDI 4302-1.
In Germany the AgBB-Scheme is a mandatory tool for the evaluation of building products and it is intended to implement odour measurement into it. Initially and essentially the newly developed method had to be put to test involving institutes that deal with VOC measurements. To test the applicability of the method an interlaboratory test was conducted. The results and identified potential improvements are presented in this study (Brosig, 2013).
While in 2012 a commercially available acrylic sealant was used as sample material, in 2014 a lacquer doped with specific substances was sent to the participants for the VOC and odour measurement. The resulting measurement values for the perceived intensity were evaluated in consideration of various boundary conditions to identify parameters that could possibly influence the measurement procedure significantly. For the comparison of both interlaboratory comparisons qualified data sets were taken as a basis. Potential for improvement identified in 2012 was mainly confirmed by the interlaboratory test 2014 as well. Besides the accurate conduction as essential part of the measurement it became obvious again that the boundary conditions of the DIN ISO 16000-28 are not defined tight enough. Moreover the thesis that measurements based on the utilisation of comparison scales with only one funnel generate results especially imprecise could not be verified. Both interlaboratory comparisons resulted in relative standard deviations of reproducibility that lay between 20 and 40 % and such are quite comparable with those of well-established interlaboratory VOC comparisons.