Re: Fabric-Covered Fiberglass Panels
From: Kai von Fintel (listsfintel.mailworks.org)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 11:13:02 -0600 (MDT)

On Monday, July 21, 2003, at 12:57 PM, Howard Landman wrote:

Also, what kind of formaldehyde is it? (Depending on the kind, it might do most of the offgassing in a few months, or keep offgassing for years to come).

        H
         \
          C = O         Formaldehyde (all atoms lie in a plane)
         /
        H

Formaldehyde is a very small and simple chemical compound CH2O. There aren't different kinds of formaldehyde molecule - it's its own mirror image so there aren't even left- and right-handed forms.

The only variants possible would be isotopic (e.g. carbon-13 instead of carbon-12 or deuterium instead of hydrogen) but that doesn't sound like what you're asking ... and those would only have a small (a few percent) effect on outgassing rate anyway (and only because heavier molecules move more slowly on average).

        Howard A. Landman

The question probably referred not to two putatively different kinds of formaldehyde but to the two different ways in which formaldehyde usually occurs in a product. Here's what the fact sheet on formaldehyde from the National Safety Council says:

There are two types of formaldehyde resins: urea formaldehyde (UF) and phenol formaldehyde (PF). Products made of urea formaldehyde can release formaldehyde gas; products made of phenol formaldehyde generally emit lower levels of the gas.

<http://www.nsc.org/ehc/indoor/formald.htm>

-- Kai.

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