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Development of Volatility Distribution for Organic Matter in Biomass Burning Emissions
Citation:
Sinha, A., I. George, A. Holder, W. Preston, M. Hays, AND A. Grieshop. Development of Volatility Distribution for Organic Matter in Biomass Burning Emissions. Environmental Science: Atmospheres. Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, Uk, , 0000, (2022). https://doi.org/10.1039/D2EA00080F
Impact/Purpose:
This manuscript describes the development of a filter and sorbent tube measurement method for identifying semi- and intermediate volatility compounds from a variety of biomass burning sources. Samples are analyzed by thermal desorption-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to detect a compounds over a range of volatilities. This data is used to derive volatility distributions that are a critical input into air quality models.
Description:
The volatility distribution of organic emissions from biomass burning and other combustion sources can determine their atmospheric evolution due to partitioning/aging. The gap between measurements and models predicting secondary organic aerosol has been partially attributed to the absence of semi- and intermediate volatility organic compounds (S/I-VOC) in models and measurements. However, S/I-VOCs emitted from these sources and typically quantified using the volatility basis framework (VBS) are not well understood. For example, the amount and composition of S/I-VOCs and how they are influenced by different sources such as residential woodstoves, open field burns, and laboratory simulated open burning are uncertain. To address this, a novel filter-in-tube sorbent tube sampling method collected S/I-VOC samples from biomass burning experiments for a range of fuels and combustion conditions. Filter-in-tube samples were analyzed using thermal desorption-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (TD/GC/MS) for compounds across a wide range of volatilities (saturation concentration, ). The S/I-VOC measurements were used to calculate volatility distributions for each emissions source. The distributions were broadly consistent across the sources with I-VOCs accounting for of the total captured organic matter, while SVOCs and LVOCs were responsible for and respectively. The distributions and predicted partitioning were generally consistent with literature. Particulate matter emission factors spanned two orders of magnitude across the sources. This work highlights the potential of inferring gas-particle partitioning behavior of biomass burning emissions using filter-in-tube sorbent samples analyzed offline. This simplifies both sampling and analysis of S/I-VOCs for studies focused on capturing the full range of organics being emitted.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Development of Volatility Distribution for Organic Matter in Biomass Burning Emissions