AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Shootout at the CSU Corral: Soot Composition and Optical Properties for 23 Cookstove/Fuel Combinations
R. SUBRAMANIAN, Antonios Tasoglou, Adam Ahern, Eric Lipsky, Christian L'Orange, Kelsey Bilsback, Brooke Reynolds, Kelley Hixson, Jack Kodros, Jeffrey R. Pierce, Michael Johnson, John Volckens, Allen Robinson, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract Number: 433 Working Group: Carbonaceous Aerosols in the Atmosphere
Abstract Biofuel-burning cookstoves are significant sources of carbonaceous aerosols in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Bond et al. 2004.) In addition to effects on indoor air quality, these aerosols contribute to climate change through the co-emission of black carbon (BC) and organic matter (OM.) Intervention efforts seek to reduce PM emissions from cooking and heating activities to improve indoor air quality. We seek to determine the resulting change on the climate impacts of these emissions, first through characterization of the physical and chemical properties of fresh cookstove emissions. To ensure comparability of emissions from different cook stove designs and fuels, a shootout was organized at Colorado State University. Fifteen different stove designs and seven different fuels (23 stove/fuel combinations) were tested, over a protocol incorporating a firepower sweep, as well as transitions between different firepower steps. The cookstove particulate emissions were characterized using an SP-AMS for organic aerosol mass, an SP2 for black carbon mass and number concentrations, photoacoustic extinctiometers for particulate light absorption and scattering at 405 nm and 532 nm, a seven-wavelength Aethalometer for filter-based aerosol absorption, and an SMPS for aerosol mobility size distributions. Preliminary results show that mass absorption cross-sections (MAC) of fresh cookstove soot from a three-stone fire and a Plancha stove, both burning Douglas fir, were similar to the canonical Bond and Bergstrom (2006) values (7.5 m$^2/g at 550 nm), at 8 m$^2/g and 6.9 m$^2/g at 532 nm respectively. However, the high time-resolution data from the SP2 and SMPS showed a shift in the aerosol size distribution for a portion of the Plancha cookstove test, from a distribution dominated by sub-100 nm aerosol (MAC-532 6.9 m$^2/g) to a distribution dominated by mobility sizes between 100-300 nm (MAC-532 12.7 m$^2/g.) Results from further investigations of this data set will be presented.