VOCs monitoring of new materials for ceramic tiles decoration: GC–MS analysis of emissions from common vehicles and inkjet inks during firing in laboratory

The decoration of ceramic tiles “ink-jet revolution” has brought significant advantages to tiles manufacturing, but the explosive diffusion, until 4–5 years ago, of this technique has not been accomplished by an adequate scientific research. Among all the features that have to be studied yet, one of the most important is the influence of the new generation inks on the total emission at ceramic chimneys. In this paper, we present a first characterization of emissions from a set of commercial inks and vehicles: they were collected by propter firing of samples in an electric kiln and analyzed by GC–MS. This study is part of a larger research project, which includes the chemical characterization and the evaluation of thermal behavior of inks and vehicles by TG-DTA and other techniques. The obtained results permit to divide common vehicles into 3 classes, depending on their thermal behavior and emissions pattern. Inks, most of which present an ester based formulation, sometimes mixed with glycols or paraffins, follow the behavior of their single components. The most common formulation leads to the presence in the emission pattern of evaporation products (2-ethylhexyl esters of lauric, myristic, decanoic and octanoic acids) and decomposition products (mainly aldehydes and 2-ethyl-1-hexanol). © 2017 SECV. Published by Elsevier España, S.L.U. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Monitorización de los COV de nuevos materiales para la decoración de azulejos cerámicos: análisis con GC-MS de las emisiones de vehículos comunes y de tintas digitales durante la cocción en laboratorio