Special Report No. 06-03: A Review of Alternatives to EPA Method 24 for the Measurement of Coating Material Volatile Organic Compounds Content

EPA Method 24 is widely used to determine the volatile organic compound (VOC) contents of coating materials. The method has been found to perform adequately when VOC contents are above 5%, but its performance on coatings with lower VOC contents has been unsatisfactory. To address this problem, EPA examined an automated thermal desorption/flame ionization detection (ATD/FID) method as a possible alternative.