AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Abstract View
Black Carbon and Nox Measurement from Three Ocean Going Vessels
JIACHENG YANG, David R. Cocker III, Kent C. Johnson, Wayne Miller, Thomas D. Durbin, Yu Jiang, Georgios Karavalakis, University of California, Riverside
Abstract Number: 233 Working Group: Combustion
Abstract Ship transportation plays a major role in the global economy and international trade by contributing to 80% of global trade by volume and over 70% of global trade by value. Black carbon (BC) emissions from ocean going vessels (OGVs) are a concern in terms of global warming and human health, especially in the Arctic regions where BC is associated with accelerated ice melting due to light absorption by BC deposited on the ice. Currently, ship-related BC emission factors range from 0.1 to 1 g/kg fuel. Uncertainty in BC emission factors is magnified by the use of a multitude of analytical instruments measurement technologies based on a variety of scientific principles. Therefore, it is necessary to quantify and standardize measurements of BC emissions from OGVs.
This study utilizes three different BC measurement methods conducted on each of three OGVs operating with heavy fuel oil (HFO) or marine gasoline oil (MGO). The ship fleet include two Tier 2 vessels and one Tier 0 vessel. The instruments utilized were an AVL microsoot sensor (MSS), which represents a light absorption photoacoustic method, an AVL smoke meter, which represents a paper-based light absorption method, and a thermal optical method, which characterizes elemental carbon (EC) emissions from a Quartz filter using the NIOSH protocol. The light absorption photoacoustic method correlates well with the paper-based light absorption method for all three vessels. However, the Quartz filter method differentiate while the ship was operating with HFO fuel. Sulfur PM dominated the PM mass when the engine burned HFO, which made the relative BC loading on the Quartz filters small. When running the heating procedure for the NIOSH ECOC Quartz filter, unexpected pyrolysis of organic carbon to BC occurred at the early heating stage, which led to a high BC result by impacting the ECOC split point. Since the NIOSH ECOC method was initially created for health study purposes, it may be worth revisiting that method to take into consideration the sulfur or heavy metal effect on EC measurements.