In this study a kinetic evaporation-condensation model was applied to assess the uncertainty in determining the volatility behaviour of organic particles from thermodenuder experiments, at conditions relevant to both ambient and laboratory measurements. <br><br> A comprehensive theoretical parametric analysis showed that re-condensation in thermodenuder experiments is highly case-dependent, being strongly determined by the combined effects of aerosol mass loading, particle size and the kinetics of condensation. Because of this dependence it is possible to find cases with either negligible or significant levels of re-condensation at high organic mass loadings, thus accounting for the diverging degrees of re-condensation reported in previous experimental and modeling studies. From this analysis it was concluded that gas denudation should generally be applied in experiments with aerosol mass loading >30 μg m⁻³. However, thermograms may be lowered in the region below 45 °C as a result of the evaporation induced by denuders for compounds with saturation concentration <i>C</i>^* > 1 μg m⁻³. <br><br> A calibration curve relating <i>C</i>^* (saturation concentration) and <i>T</i>₅₀ (temperature at which 50% of aerosol mass evaporates) was theoretically derived and tested to infer volatility distributions from experimental thermograms. While this approach was found to hold at equilibrium, significant underestimation of the particle volatility was found under kinetically-controlled evaporation conditions. Because thermograms obtained at ambient aerosol loading levels are most likely to show departure from equilibrium, the application of a kinetic evaporation model is more suitable for inferring volatility properties of atmospheric samples than the calibration curve approach; however, this method implies significant uncertainty, due to the sensitivity of the kinetic model to the assumption of "effective" accommodation coefficient. <br><br> Predictions of the evaporation-condensation behaviour of α-pinene SOA exhibited a large uncertainty in estimating the aerosol mass formation induced by cooling, depending on whether it was assumed that gas condensation was affected by the amorphous solid state of the particles. Evaluation of the dilution-induced evaporation of α-pinene SOA showed that the equilibrium partitioning theory underpredicts the aerosol mass concentration by a factor of between 5 and 10, with respect to kinetic calculations. Analysis in this study suggests that, the mass transfer kinetic coefficient, inclusive of diffusive kinetic limitations, is a critical unknown to both estimating the volatility properties and determining the atmospheric gas-particle partitioning of SOA.