Interlaboratory comparison of passive samplers for organic vapours with respect to their applicability to indoor air pollution monitoring: a pilot study.

This document reports on analytical work carried out in cooperation among three European laboratories. The purpose of this work was to carry out a first assessment on the performances of passive samplers for organic vapours when used in indoor air pollution monitoring and simultaneously to evaluate theinterlaboratory agreement on low concentration analysis of a variety of volatile organic compounds. Two types of passive samplers were thus exposed in the different facilities and replicate specimens were analysed at each of the three laboratories. The most important finding was that differences seem to exist between different specimens of the same sampler type. Overall reproducibility and accuracy has been within 40%, but reproducibility was better than 20% if a correction for the effect of systematic differences between samplers was introduced.