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SURVEY OF CONTINUOUS SOURCE EMISSION MONITORS: SURVEY NO. 1 - NOX AND SO2
Citation:
Osborne, M. AND M. Midgett. SURVEY OF CONTINUOUS SOURCE EMISSION MONITORS: SURVEY NO. 1 - NOX AND SO2. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/4-77/022 (NTIS PB270959).
Description:
The Quality Assurance Branch (QAB) of the Environmental Monitoring and Support Laboratory has undertaken the task of evaluating the accuracy and reliability of continuous monitors which have been on-line for six months or longer. Only extractive monitors installed in power plants, sulfuric acid plants, and smelters were included in the first survey. The program was designed so that additional industries and types of monitors could be included in later surveys. The plan for the initial survey involved sending NBS-traceable gas cylinders of varying concentrations of SO2 or NO to the participating industries. The gases from the cylinders were introduced into the monitoring systems and the resulting data made available to both the QAB and the industry. Results from this survey of eight different companies, ten different plant sites, and nineteen different monitors revealed that less than half of the monitors failed to achieve a performance accuracy of + 10 percent. The instruments which failed most often were the ones that have seen less wide-spread use. In general, the SO2 monitors and the NOx monitors performed equally well. However, more information was available on SO2 monitors since they outnumbered NOx monitors in this survey almost two to one.