AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Gas/particle Partitioning Measurements of Polar Semi-volatile Organic Compounds
MINGJIE XIE, Michael Hannigan, Kelley C. Barsanti, University of Colorado-Boulder
Abstract Number: 595 Working Group: Urban Aerosols
Abstract Both gas and particle phase polar semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOCs; e.g., poly acids and polyols) were collected at Palmer elementary school (Denver, CO), one centrally located site used for the Denver Aerosol Sources and Health (DASH) study. The sample collection started on August 22nd 2012, and will be finished by the end of August 2013. Both filter and absorbent samples were collected every six day for 24-h. Preliminary analysis show that levoglucosan does exist in gas phase, suggesting that the gas/particle (G/P) partitioning might affect the quantification of biomass burning emissions in receptor-based source apportionment studies that only use particle phase levoglucosan data. The polyurethane foam (PUF) was found to have high collection efficiency (> 80%) for gas phase levoglucosan through breakthrough tests. Recent chamber and field studies found that the absorptive G/P partitioning theory, which assumed a reversible and equilibrium G/P partitioning, could not apply for all SVOCs (Perraud et al., 2012; Zhao et al., 2013). Our later work will focus on the quantification of gas/particle partitioning of levoglucosan and other polar SVOCs (e.g., 2-methyltetrols) based on all collected samples, so as to understand if the absorptive partitioning theory could explain the G/P partitioning of those polar SVOCs studied in this work.