10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
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Dirty Jets: Observations of Ultrafine Particle Plumes from Landing Aircraft at Boston Logan Airport and a Data Science Approach to Identify the Culprits
Scott Hersey, Allen Downey, Caz Nichols, EBEN CROSS, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
Abstract Number: 1538 Working Group: Air Quality in Megacities: from Sources to Control
Abstract We present data collected at a community partner’s home on the approach path to runway 27 at Boston Logan Airport during 3 weeks of sampling during 2017 and 2018. During periods of active landing on runway 27, aircraft passed the sampling site at a distance of 110 m and an average altitude of 75 m, with intervals of 30-300 s. During runway 27 use, plumes of particles with size mode between 10 and 30 nm were observed within 40-60 s of aircraft fly-by, and reached concentrations of 100,000 to 500,000 cm-3 before exponential concentration decay as plumes dispersed. Plume concentration varied substantially between aircraft. A tool was built in python to construct a database of aircraft landing and take-off events at the airport from publicly available FAA data, extracting aircraft type and carrier as well as position and altitude. Thrust behavior when passing the study site was inferred from the derivative of descent trajectories, thereby allowing for an investigation into the most important factors determining plume strength from descending aircraft – namely aircraft/engine type and thrust behavior. We will present gas-and particle-phase measurements, details of our participatory, community-driven approach, and a description of the python tool and its development.