New Markers and Monitoring Concepts for Ship Emissions Using Single-Particle Mass Spectrometry

Johannes Passig, Julian Schade, Ellen-Iva Rosewig, Lukas Anders, Robert Irsig, Seongho Jeong, Thorsten Streibel, Thomas Adam, Hendryk Czech, Andreas Walte, RALF ZIMMERMANN, University of Rostock

     Abstract Number: 318
     Working Group: Source Apportionment

Abstract
Air pollution from ships affects the atmospheric environment with substantial impacts on public health and climate. Up to 400,000 annual deaths were attributed to ship emissions (Sofiev et al., 2018). Emission control areas (ECA) are widespread to protect coastal regions by limiting the ship fuel’s sulfur content. In ECAs, the traditional bunker fuels are either replaced by distillates such as marine gasoil (MGO) or the ships are equipped with exhaust cleaning devices (“scrubber”) to reduce the sulphur emissions. While the cleaner fuels also produce severe health effects, they do not contain metal residues from the refinery process. Thus, the traditional marker concept for ship emissions becomes obsolete because it is based on these metals. We target this gap by introducing a new method to detect ship emission particles by their content of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Using new ionization methods in SPMS (Schade et al., 2019), we measured single-particle PAH mass spectra from a ship engine running on different fuels and found fuel-specific signatures for the majority of particles (Anders et al., 2023). These PAH fingerprints are highly stable for different engine loads and particle sizes and indicate the used fuels independent from the metals. Beyond the PAHs, we could also substantially improve the SPMS sensitivity to the metals in bunker fuel emissions by exploiting resonance effects during ionization (Passig et al., 2020). This enhances the range of plume detection to more than 10 kilometres and allows to detect particles even from ships with scrubbers installed (Passig et al., 2021). We also present results from chasing ship plumes at open sea and show that compliance checks for the allowed fuels can work over distances of several kilometers with our technique (Rosewig et al., 2023).

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[4] Rosewig, E.-I. et al. (2023), under review.
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