Investigating the emission of volatile organic compound from Cinnamomum camphora

Woodwork has functions as the versatile and sustainable furniture material to decorate buildings in our low-carbon society, while commonly giving significant risks of releasing volatile organic compound (VOC). Thus, how to accurately identify and quantify the VOC of woodwork raw materials is critical. Herein, we designed an easy-to-handle, processable, time-saving strategy of coupling headspace (HS) and gas chromatography (GC) to effectively and precisely investigate the emission behavior of VOC of Cinnamomum camphora (C. camphora). The effects of operation parameters of HS-GC on the VOC emission are analyzed in detail, where the optimize treatment conditions are 140 °C of equilibrium temperature, 25 h of equilibrium time, and 20–40 mesh of particle size. In addition, camphor and eucalyptol are the main chemical components of VOC, which shows the high content, more than 50 % of harvesting VOC. Moreover, a semi-empirical model for VOC emission of C. camphora is established, in which the predicted VOC emission demonstrates a strongly linear relationship with the experimental results (R2 > 0.99). This study enables the comprehensive understanding of VOC emission of raw materials of woodwork, beyond C. camphora, and provides references to effectively reduce VOC in sustainably building and construction.