10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
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Application of Positive Matrix Factorisation to the Source Identification of Pcdd/Fs in Urban Air, South Korea
EUNHWA JANG, Taewuk Jeong, Nana Yoon, Seungryul Jeong, Busan Metropolitan Institute of Health and Environment
Abstract Number: 451 Working Group: Source Apportionment
Abstract Polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs) are ubiquitous compounds which produce unintentionally through the chemical manufacturing and combustion processes, persist in the environment and bioaccumulate in the food chain. Because of the known toxic properties of PCDD/Fs, it is required to make an emission estimates for PCDD/Fs to identify the dominant sources to the environment and to examine the effectiveness of source reduction measures.
However, there are considerable uncertainties in making PCDD/Fs emission estimates owing to their source variability. Therefore, source apportionment modeling has been extensively performed to obtain information about site-specific pollution sources using measured concentrations.
Positive Matrix Factorisation (PMF) has been widely applied to ambient measurements in recent years to compare source-specific contributions to atmospheric pollution levels. There are some difficulties to extract site representative profiles because of the uncertainties caused by weathering process (atmospheric reaction and deposition) from each source to receptors. However, the fact that there are distinctive signatures of PCDD/Fs composition among the different sources support the existence of source specific profiles (US EPA, 2006).
PMF 5.0 has been applied to two merged datasets (2 industrial urban sites and 3 urban background sites) consisting of ambient measurements for PCDD/Fs concentrations from 2007 to 2016. An additional industry dataset consisting of both PCDD/Fs and Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) concentrations informed by knowledge of local emission characteristics has been subjected to PMF to obtain supportive explanations for the PMF factor profiles for PCDD/Fs.
Analysis of industrial urban dataset revealed five major source categories corresponding to industrial thermal processes (accounting for 14.5% of total toxicity equivalent PCDD/Fs mass), ferrous metal production (41.0%), nonferrous metal production (18.6%), diesel vehicle emissions (20.2%) and traffics (5.7%). As expected, metallurgical industry was the dominant contributor to the sum of PCDD/Fs, followed by diesel exhaust emissions. PMF factor profile with emissions from ferrous production activities was predominantly associated with penta- and hexa-chlorinated furans having relatively large toxic equivalence factors.
References US EPA(2006). An Inventory of Soureces and Environmental Releases of Dioxin-Like Compounds in the Uninted States for the Years 1987, 1995, and 2000.