AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Aerosol Measurement Artefacts using High-Volume Cascade Impactors with Polyurethane Foam and Their Implications
ELISABETH GALARNEAU, Megha Patel, Jeff Brook, Jean-Pierre Charland, Marianne Glasius, Hayley Hung, Environment Canada
Abstract Number: 622 Working Group: Instrumentation and Methods
Abstract The ChemVol® is a high-volume cascade impactor (HVCI) designed to separate airborne particles of different sizes. Polyurethane foam (PUF) rings are typically used as impaction substrates.
The ChemVol® sampler was originally designed to capture involatile aerosols for use in toxicity studies. Due to its high flow rate and large sample volumes, there has been interest in using it to study the organic fraction of airborne particulate matter. This fraction includes semivolatile organic compounds (SVOCs).
We have tested the hypothesis that PUF’s inherent sorption capacity makes it unsuitable as a ChemVol® substrate when SVOCs are among the target compounds. Results of experiments using side-by-side measurements with alternate samplers, pre-filtering of incoming air, and spiking of substrates with known amounts of analyte confirm that SVOCs measured on ChemVol® substrates do not faithfully represent size-segregated particle-phase concentrations.
We present the details of our experiments with attention on options for correcting observations. We also discuss consequences for evaluating SVOC size distributions and implications for assessing toxicity of size-distributed airborne particulate matter.