Consumers worry about the presence of nano-particles in paints and the risk of exposure. As a result, the paint industry now omits marketing paints as containing nanoparticles. The industry claims that no nanoparticles are released into the indoor environment; this, however, has yet to be documented. In this study, the emission of nano-sized emission from four indoor paints was investigated. The emission was studied for both base and full-pigmented versions of the paints, which consisted of three water-borne acrylic paints and one solvent-borne alkyd paint. All experiments were performed twice in a 6.783 m3 stainless-steel test chamber under standardized conditions (22.98 °C, 50.08% RH, air exchange rate 0.48 h-1). Emissions during the paint-drying period were measured using a TSI Fast Mobility Particle Sizer (FMPS) measuring the number concentration of nano-particles and the size distribution in the range 5.6-560 nm. The results from the solvent-borne paint showed the highest concentration, with a mean concentration of 3.2·105 particles/cm3 and a maximum of 1.4·106 particles/cm3. This paint also had the smallest particle size distribution, with 9.31 nm particles as the most dominant particle size. The results from this study showed that the exposure to nanoparticles for the residents evaluated over a 7 or 28 day period was low and that interior paints are probably not very important when it comes to identifying products that release nano-particles into indoor environments.
Keywords: Carbon Black; Exposure; Indoor air; Nano-particles; Nano-sized emission; Particle size distribution.
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