AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Data Analysis Procedures for a Novel Volatility and Polarity Separator (VAPS) Instrument for Atmospheric Organic Aerosol Chacterization
YAPING ZHANG, Raul Martinez, John Jayne, Manjula Canagaratna, Thorsten Hohaus, Douglas Worsnop, Brent Williams, Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract Number: 407 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract Two-dimensional chromatography has been applied to ambient aerosol in order to increase the molecular separation of complex samples. A significant challenge of analyzing multi-dimensional chromatograms is to identify and quantify the thousands of individual compounds found in ambient samples. The Volatility and Polarity Separator (VAPS) is an automated, field-portable instrument for in situ chemical characterization of organic aerosol as a function of volatility and polarity. The VAPS system sacrifices the molecular-level separation of multi-dimensional chromatography for improved mass throughput of oxidized and nonvolatile species. VAPS data consists of hourly volatility- and polarity-resolved bins of semivolatile and nonvolatile organic aerosol detected with high-resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Analysis procedures, created with IGOR software (Wavemetrics Inc., Portland, OR), for novel VAPS data are presented here. The data analysis procedures include: auto retention time shifting, auto volatility and polarity binning of VAPS data, and auto internal standard mass calibration with interpolation of those calibrations across the entire VAPS data space. Lab and field (from SOAS 2013, Centreville, AL) VAPS data will be used to illustrate these auto data analysis procedures.