Released during 3-dimensional (3D) printing polymeric parts and many other industrial processes, the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are mixtures that can pollute air quality and harm human health. Particularly, VOCs dominate in causing sick-building syndrome symptoms. Selective laser sintering (SLS) is a popular 3D technique, where the elevated temperature and high-energy laser beam tend to cause more detrimental VOC emission than other 3D printing processes. Though previous work reported to model emission in some 3D printing processes, the emission modelling and prediction in SLS has remained largely unexploited. This work proposes a mass-transfer and experiment-data based approach to model and predict VOC emission in SLS. We monitored the VOC emissions from polyamide 12 in 6 cases with varying printing parameters. With emission curve segmentation based on the physical printing process, we applied the mass-transfer single- and multiple-layer model to simulate the VOC emission. Model matching subsequently yields the suitable model type and node number in each printing stage. Results showed the proposed method has an average accuracy of 85.32% matching to the experiment results.